AMD Unveils Zen Microarchitecture, Demos Summit Ridge Performance

[Guest]

AMD revealed the new Zen microarchitecture, which will initially come to market in its Summit Ridge desktop CPUs. AMD provided new architectural details and a head-to-head render test against an underclocked Intel Broadwell-E Core i7-6900K.

AMD Unveils Zen Microarchitecture, Demos Summit Ridge Performance : Read more

 

[Deleted member 1353997]

Looking good so far.
Unfortunately, I'm way too biased towards Intel to consider buying an AMD CPU any time in the near future, but I really hope Zen does well. Competition is good, and Intel definitely needs that competition.

 

[ComputerSecurityGuy]

So 6 core Broadwell is roughly on par with Zen. Not bad, AMD. That's decently competitive. What I really want to se is perf per watt figures though.

 

[Neoku]

40% over Excavator is disappointing.

 

[ComputerSecurityGuy]

Oops, I forgot that the i7-6900K was 8C/16T. This is better than I dared hope. I was expecting slightly slower than the i7-5960X. Instead I get slightly faster. And the i7-5960X was at the more optimistic end of my projections.

 

[xenol]

@Neoku
So is 10% increments Intel's been doing over the past five generations.

 

[hannibal]

Of-course the test program was something that zen is good at, but at least it can exchange blows with intel in some applications and that is a good thing!
Intel will most probably clock higher and be in general faster, but if Zen gets close in some cases and is not too far behind in another programs, not bad at all! It is really good to the competition! Hopefully Samsung 10nm node is good, so that AMD can move to that in the next update. Otherwise the Intel will get farther away, with its own 10nm production node, that most probably is better than what Samsung can do, but at least the difference would not be so huge as it has been several years.

 

[Ionlydothis]

lol pretty funny presentation. Was almost like I was watching an Nvidia one...

If only Zen wasn't 2 years too late... Still, maybe someday they'll lead again...

 

[SylentVyper]

@Xenol

I sort of agree with him though. They're saying a 40% increase over Excavator, which has been around for 5 years. Intel doing 10% a year for 5 years is 50%, so until actual reviews and benchmarks come out - at least from a numbers standpoint - they're no closer to Intel than they were 5 years ago.

 

[xxredcowxx]

Under-clocking the Intel chip to boost stats on "comparable" systems and Zen was not even noticeably faster? That's sad.

 

[IceMyth]

What I would love is to know the price range for the Zen 8-Core & 4-Cores, also after release will have to wait few months until MB start releasing their wide range of them. On the other hand seems the speed for both of them wont exceed 3.2k after boosting!

 

[hannibal]

No, it is not sad... its the reality. No one can compete with Intel at this moment in big CPUs. But this time AMD is closer than ever during the time period of the last 5 years, where Intel has had non competition situation.

 

[hannibal]

What I would love is to know the price range for the Zen 8-Core & 4-Cores, also after release will have to wait few months until MB start releasing their wide range of them. On the other hand seems the speed for both of them wont exceed 3.2k after boosting!

True, the Samsung finvet production node has its limits in clock-speed. But this is much higher than I expected after Polaris GPU.

 

[realibrad]

@SYLENTVYPER
You have to compound the 10%. If it were 10% every time, then you should be closer to 60% growth.

 

[AndrewJacksonZA]

I'm a wee bit disappointed that they are only releasing Zen in 2017.

I was/am considering upgrading my PC towards the end of the year and I was waiting for Zen to come out because I want to give it a decent chance and see how it stacks up against Intel's offerings (and I'm hoping that CPU and motherboard prices would come down a little bit ;-)

But hey, what's another few months, I guess? *siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh*

 

[JamesSneed]

Under-clocking the Intel chip to boost stats on "comparable" systems and Zen was not even noticeably faster? That's sad.

Its not sad. It was to show IPC and performance of Zen vs Broadwell. Which if the demo is to be trusted its about the same as Broadwell. This is also early silicon so they probably haven't ramped up the clocks yet as they fine tune the chips I'm sure you will see higher clocks than 3Ghz. I hope it is on par with Intel's Broadwell architecture that would be some nice competition since Intel hasn't improved IPC much since Broadwell.

 

[InvalidError]

So Zen is officially delayed into 2017 for general availability and is roughly on par with Broadwell(-E). AMD had better hope Kaby Lake doesn't break Intel's 5-7%/generation trend.

 

[WFang]

Until now they have kept mentioning high-end enthusiast Zen shipping in Q4-16 / end of year.. this article only mentions shipping to 'partners' this year? -Did they slide the high-end enthusiast cpu's into Q1-17 as well?

 

[redgarl]

Intel last 3 Gen of CPU have no impact on games and have barely seen any improvement in calculation power. It's kind of sad. If AMD can provide similar performance for less, guess what, they will keep their leadership in the console business. That's about 225 millions consoles every 5 years.

 

[falchard]

AMD has always been stronger at 3D rendering since it makes use of many threads, overflowing the buffer, out of order large indices, and the like which the precious architecture targets well. AMD loses against well optimized applications that use less parallelism. It doesn't look like much will change if they are touting 3D benchmarks.

 

[Guest]

If AMD delivers Broadwell performance or more for fraction of what Intel counterpart cost, they got my money.

 

[InvalidError]

If AMD delivers Broadwell performance or more for fraction of what Intel counterpart cost, they got my money.

If Zen manages to match Broadwell, it will likely get priced half-way to the next step below. Ex.: if the top-end Zen matches the i7-6900k, it'll get priced between the 6850k and 6900k, which will still set you back more than $700.

 

[ajpaolello]

I'm taking the benchmark with a grain of salt. Need more test before I believe anything

 

[captaincharisma]

i stopped reading at the part where they had to underclock an intel I7 to match the speed of the test chip. top notch marketing as always by AMD

 

[littleleo]

I'm a wee bit disappointed that they are only releasing Zen in 2017.

I was/am considering upgrading my PC towards the end of the year and I was waiting for Zen to come out because I want to give it a decent chance and see how it stacks up against Intel's offerings (and I'm hoping that CPU and motherboard prices would come down a little bit ;-)

But hey, what's another few months, I guess? *siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh*

Yeah, that was a big bummer I was expecting to see product the last quarter of this year, but pushed back again to 1 quarter next year for now. Probably will eventually be out in October of 2017.