AMD Ryzen Chips 10% Smaller When Compared to Intel Skylake Dies

AMD states its upcoming Ryzen core fits into a 10 percent smaller die area than Intel’s currently shipping second-generation 14nm processor. Analysts and even Intel engineers in the session said the Zen core is clearly competitive though many confidential variables will determine whether the die advantage translates into lower cost for AMD reports eetimes.

EEtimes: The paper detailed techniques AMD used to reduce switching capacitance by 15 percent compared to its existing chips. For example, Zen marked AMD’s first use of a metal-insulator-metal capacitor which helped lower operating voltages and provide greater per-core voltage and frequency control.

Engineers tracked on a weekly basis power benchmarks on high activity regions for more than a year to reduce switching capacitance. The company now has two eight-core designs running with simultaneous multithreading at 3.4 GHz.

Hilbert: one thing they are not taking into account is the lacking integrated GPU. On Intels side it eats up nearly a third of the die space. For AMD, they do not use an IGP - the entire die size is thus used for the actual processors.