AMDs upcoming ZEN series processors are absolutely dominating the processor news-front this year. The hype is real. New information surfaced about updated engineering sample. The processor that is supposed to run IPC perf as fast as Intels Broadwell-E shows higher clocks.

User AMD Polaris reported that new information new SKUs that have just hit the post-boxes of the mainboard manufacturers. Both processors spotted are A0 revisions and Engineering Samples.

The first one is an 8-core design with AMD's HT implementation and it's got a 3150 MHz base clock, it's all-core turbo is 3300 MHz and the max turbo for 1 core is 3600 Mhz. Yes, here are some improvements regarding the previous 8-core SKU under the same TDP envelope.

The second SKU is a 4-core one with AMD's HT. It's got a 65W TDP and the base clock is still 2900 MHz. All-core turbo is 3100 MHz, max turbo is 3400 MHz. I don't know if it's only an SKU for testing mainboards or something is not okay with the clock-wattage correlation. I mean on higher clocks the 4-core SKU steps into the 95W TDP envelope, AMD can't keep the wattage low. Maybe GloFo's 14nm process needs some maturing.

Retail AM4 mainboards are under production. The whole platform will be ready to have a paper-launch at the end of the year with a real availability in February of 2017. Performance wise the Zen uarch will be around Haswell and Broadwell (except for FMA), it seems it won't catch Skylake clock for clock. It's not a big deal, but if the clocks can't go higher until the start it won't fulfill the expectations.

And we all know that expectations in this case are very high.

New AMD Engineering Sample Zen Processors get higher Clocks