It's been a long time since I was last excited what AMD has to offer. Hopefully this puts AMD back on the map, the x86 market needs a second strong contender. I might choose AMD for that reason alone, if they get within 20% ballpark of Intel IPC. Especially Skylake comparable AVX-512 performance would be good.
I also hope they'll put some more effort in Catalyst drivers. Had pretty horrible experience under Ubuntu 15.04 recently...
That's only true for Intel Skylake mobile/desktop CPUs. I find desktop and mobile offerings too unreliable for anything serious, due to lack of ECC support. Data corruption on non-ECC systems has bitten me more than once. I've learned my lesson.
Skylake Xeons — the only Intel chips I'm interested in anyways — on the other hand will support AVX-512. The software I'm writing already has rudimentary support for AVX-512. The prospect of processing 64 of 16 bit elements per clock cycle per core is pretty exciting. 32x per instruction (512/16) and 2x comes hopefully from dual issue.
Besides, we're talking about AMD chips here, aren't we?
I also hope they'll put some more effort in Catalyst drivers. Had pretty horrible experience under Ubuntu 15.04 recently...