Reviews seem to be out. Here the comprehensiv eone from Gamers Nexus : http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/2822-amd-ryzen-r7-1800x-review-premiere-blender-fps-benchmarks

Looks like its i5-grade in terms of gaming. The usual productivity benchmarks seem to place it in God tier though.

Yup, that's very weird. An old (antique!) i7 2600k is just a few per cent behind the high end Ryzen CPU with 8 physical cores and 16 threads in video games. But when it comes to video rendering, encoding or packing/unpacking files, the $500 1800X is on a par with Intel's $1000 i7 6900k O.O

It'll be interesting to see how new games work with Ryzen. Maybe this is just an optimization thing?

wow, what a letdown gaming-wise...

I don't imagine many people going for the 1800X for gaming. At the price its at, it would be very difficult to justify it, even if most games are more GPU than CPU dependent. At this price, whether it competes with the 6900K in production tasks or not, I'd be very concerned about the lack of tangible boost it provides. At lower price points, it can be excused to a certain extent, where CPUs are there to not bottleneck GPUs, but in the price range its at, I'd think most people would want more.

Most do seem to be going for the 1700/1700x rather than the 1800, but no surprise there.

As someone on OCUK forums said "Regarding optimisations for the Zen uarch - I think everybody realises it will take a while,but the Windows drivers according to AMD would come within a month,and the SMT issue could have been avoided if AMD told reviewers that SMT might cause performance issues due to immature support."

I dare say once drivers are out & improved upon, the CPUs may seem much better. Similar to how loads said AMD had failed with the RX480 gfx card, but shortly afterwards newer drivers came out & the RX480 has proven to be a beast for its price.

P.S. Lisa Su confirms Ryzen does support ECC ram, it is just up to the motherboard manufacturers to enable support for it.

LinusTechTips did a review/talk about it too, but I'll link to one special part...

Almost forgot, Linux.

There was Reddit AMA about Ryzen, Lisu Su answered some questions.

The 800 quid Intel CPU is probably an 8 core Broadwell E 6900k- the 4 core i7 7700k is only slightly more expensive than an R7 1700 ($490 R7 vs $530 i7, here). A 6900k is really a very top end enthusiast or low(ish) end workstation chip, and the 1800x is competitive with it at less than half the price in most applications- and the 1700 not that far behind either at 2/3 the cost of the 1800x- so price performance wise Ryzen certainly is hugely competitive for anything that requires lots of cores or threads.

The 7700k will nearly always beat a R7 in current games though, few utilise more than 8 threads and its core frequency is far higher than an R7's, expecting anything else is unrealistic. That may well not be the case in a few years though, I'd expect the Ryzens to have far better longevity than a 7700k..

I'd like to see some RX480 systems used for testing as well though, they'd be a better indicator for what eventual performance of Ryzen may be since they'd (presumably) have a head start on ironing out any potential driver foibles that effect Ryzen performance

nice to to see that the question about opening up their "Platform Security Processor" is the top-voted comment.
So there are still people who care about this :)

they also answered a question about Windows7 support:

I expected single core performance to be on the level of Intel Sandy Bridge (i7-2700K) and i wasn't disappointed. It is 50% improvement on AMD Bulldozer (it had 1.01 score in CB 11.5 single threading performance).
Now AMD won't suck at games like ARMA 3 and StarCraft 2 (and other games, which benefit strong single core performance).

Multicore performance is insane (>2 times of Intel Haswell i7). Absolutely insane. I think data centers will be very happy.
Desktop PC gamers will benefit from it too thanks to DirectX 12 and Vulkan.

Screenshots for comparison attached.

You missed my point. The best Ryzen CPU is on a par with Intel's six years old i7 2600k in games and gets its ass kicked by a "reasonably priced" i7 7700k. Now imagine how good a "reasonably priced" Ryzen 1700 (which costs just as much as the entioned i7 7700k) will be for gaming. So, if you're gamer: Don't get a Ryzen CPU. That's what I wanted to say.

Unfortunately, once the Ryzen drivers are released, anything gained from them will be windoze10 only :(
Unless someone manages to shift them over from win10/Linux to win7.

Yes, that is true. Unless they pulled an Intel and the flagship is only slightly more powerful than the others in the series at a much higher price. But currently, it seems AMD won't be able to compete at the highest level too well with Intel, which is still better than barely competing with i5s for the past few years.

My current hopes lie with the 6 core Ryzens. Considering that they were able to make OC-able 8 core CPUs with 65W / 95W TDPs, it will be very interesting to see the OC headroom and performance the 6 cores offer. I doubt the 4 cores will touch the performance of an Intel 4 core, and I doubt it will be cheaper than the Athlon X4 760K, or offer nearly as much headroom.

Speaking of 4 core, since AM4 is the universal AMD socket from now on, AMD's APUs can finally have DDR4 RAM without need for another socket, which can't be bad. Also, the headroom offered by the new GPU-removed APUs combined with Ryzen's efficiency may have some potential..............

Linux might be the way to go after all. And that's true irrespective of one going the intel/Kabby Lake route or the AMD/Ryzen route since MS$ will ensure Windows 7 is not updated to care for any new CPU.

What is also true is that AMD coming back with some competent CPUs, coupled to DDR4 support is good for both the AMD fans or for Intel customers. Market dominance encouraged Intel to complacency.

Obviously, Ryzen needs some time ( possibly next Bios generation / driver update ) before we see what it's actually worth. Phoronix's reviews are promising, to be seen how things further evolve with the next Linux kernels.

I'm certainly curious to see how "Naples" and its smaller brothers (that's Zen for servers) will fare against and compare to Xeon. Big data , augmented reality and the like is a milk cow for Intel now. In that context, indeed we would see Ryzen ending up in workstations.