AMD ZEN Engineering Sample Specs Leaked





New details on AMD Zen based CPUs have surfaced, the information is based on engineering samples that AMD already has been circulating. Blogger Dresdenboy AMD has confirmed the information making the reliability of the information plausible.
The engineering samples currently are set at revision A0. The user who spread the details talks about four chips with 4, 8, 24 and 32 of cores. The first two SKUs would be for the AM4-socket, while the last two were intended for servers.
- 4 variants of ES Zen are available at the moment:
- AM4 8 cores with 95W TDP
- AM4 4 cores with 65W TDP
- SP3 24 cores with 150W TDP
- SP3 32 cores with 180W TDP
The two AM4 chips are quad-core and octa-core with 8 and 16 threads. The quad-core would be get 2 MB L2 cache and 8MB L3 cache, while the octa-core would get double that amount. Both engineering samples currently run a clock speed of 2.8 GHz, with a maximum boost up to 3.2 GHz. The TDP of the two would be 65 watts for the chip with four cores and 95 watts for the octa-core. In idle the clock speed can throttle down back to 550 MHz with an amzing power consumption 2.5 and 5 watts idle power.
For servers there is the SP3 platform. The leaker has details on a 24-core and 32-core chip. The boost clock speed is at the 24-core 2.75 GHz and the 32-core 2.9 GHz. The idle-clock rate is 400 MHz here with even lower. The TDP of the two is 150 and 180 watts respectively. These chips have two 64 MB L3 cache, with the 24-core 12 MB of L2 cache and get the 32-core 16MB. This suggests that every Zen-core inherits 512KB of L2 cache, while each set of four cores gets 8MB L3 cache. This corresponds to a previously surfaced die-shot of a core-Zen.
The information has been confirmed by Dresdenboy, he has a good track record, but it remains a rumor/leak and as such a grain of salt is something you should always take this info with.
Senior Member
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AMD making real CPUs again, I never thought I'd see the day...
Senior Member
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I am hopeful for these. If they deliver might be my next upgrade step. Either that or Broadwell-E tho by then waiting for Skylake-X is not a bad option.......
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This could be the death of AMD! If the clock really is 2.8GHz with 3.2GHz boost they will be laughed into bankruptcy court.
Don Vito Corleone
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What part of A0 engineering samples did you not get ?
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The final chips will probably be clocked a little higher.
Senior Member
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I hope they perform as well as the specs look! I wouldn't mind 16 threads

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AND a clockspeed means nothing.
Senior Member
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you know that clock frequ doesnt equal performance?
if they can do 2x the calculations per cycle, clocks wont matter much.
the same way HP dont tell you, how fast a car can go.
Senior Member
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Have you actually seen how a 5ghz AMD bulldozer compares to a core i7 2600k @ 4ghz.
Even if those clocks were the final clocks which they most likely aren't tell you nothing, nada.
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I love these CPU threads. It unites most Intel owners (independent of GPU brand) to support AMD.

Me too, BTW. It's good for competition and maybe I'll buy one again in the future.
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Need I remind you how a 2.2GHz Athlon64 absolutely raped 3.2GHz Pentiums in 2003?
Or how the 2.4GHz E6700 demolished a 2.8GHz Athlon64 FX-62 back in 2006?
Clock speed is nothing when you compare different architectures.
As a matter of fact, I am not surprised by AMD's move. It reeks of those same old days all over again. More work done with lower clocks. I would not be surprised if Intel retaliates in a similar fashion. Current CPUs could use a 'refresh' since we're already around the 4GHz mark again. Obviously, a far smaller fab process allows easy overclocks past 4.5GHz but do note that the thermal envelope past those frequencies tends to get out of hand fast (see FX-9590 or any processor approaching 5GHz in general).
With DX12 and Vulkan emerging the barriers or single-threaded performance requirements in games are slowly fading away. We will finally see 8 cores being put to good use.
If anything, that low clockspeed of Zen inspires great confidence to me.
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I love these CPU threads. It unites most Intel owners (independent of GPU brand) to support AMD.

Me too, BTW. It's good for competition and maybe I'll buy one again in the future.
I think everybody's fed up with the costs of building an Intel PC.

I also quite like the APUs - want to build me a nice HTPC at some point. I'm guessing the Zen-based APUs will support hardware H265 decoding - which is a must for future-proofing any HTPC.
I used to own an AMD64 3200+ socket 939 single core processor. After that I went Intel all the way. Really looking forward to some proper competition in the CPU market

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We do know that this will have roughly Ivy Bridge IPC so it does mean something. If it doesn't clock high enough it will not be that fast. I hope that Zen+ will clocks well and that GF's 14nm process improves a lot in the near future.
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Finally some real specs on Zen. Somehow it feels like the old Athlon 64 days, hope i'm right, we really need AMD to get back in the game with CPU's.
Senior Member
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Finally some Zen nip slips. Can't wait for more.
Also boss, theres a typo, "AMS" instead of AMD.