AMD CEO Lisa Su reconfirms ZEN release in Q1 2017
Click here to post a comment for AMD CEO Lisa Su reconfirms ZEN release in Q1 2017 on our message forum
Clawedge
ok guys, as usual, people will make up expectations, and when (not if) AMD does not deliver, they will continue to suck.
There, i have cleared the air, so no bitching by anyone please, move on, go buy intel etc etc etc.
Yes i was an amd fan once, but i can only wait for so long.
Corbus
Good thing about amd is that it will have only AM4 socket. Hope at least the mobos will be cheaper than their intel counterparts.
BigMaMaInHouse
It will be my next PC 🙂,
Will replace I7 860 @4.0Ghz.
Going for red team all the way (just got RX 470).
Kaarme
You are saying people suck if they expect anything from AMD? Gee, thanks. The world must look mighty fine from the top of your mile high horse.
PrMinisterGR
If the performance figures hold up, an 8-core Zen will be a massive upgrade. I just hope they have lower prices than Intel.
SSD_PRO
My favorite line:
So if you take an Broadwell-E sample released a year prior, downclock it to match frequency of a Summit Ridge sample, the Summit Ridge unit will be some degree of "faster". That is quite a low bar.
It's all about price folks. If you can get a AM4 motherboard for <$300USD and a 8 core unit for <$400, and that combo is on par or even 10% slower than a comparable Intel part, we have a winner that can disrupt Intel's pricing. If that pricing creeps to 500 for the higher end 8 core part the sales won't be high enough to disrupt anything.
PrMinisterGR
Broadwell-E launched on Q2 2016. That would make them 9 months apart max. Considering how slow moving the CPU market has been, and the underwhelming performance increases in Kaby Lake, the performance will be fine. You fail to mention that AMD is launching a single platform, and not two separate ones, which is the decent thing to do.
The comparable processor would be the Intel Core i7-6900K 8/16 (cores/threads) 3.2 GHz / 3.7 GHz (base clock / turbo clock), which is at this point clocked at 100MHz higher than an engineering sample.
The 8-core Zen is shaping up to have the same performance (or nearly identical) with the 6900K whose cheapest price at the moment is 938 euros. I cannot see the 8-core Zen part selling for less than 600, and it would still be the bargain of the century.
nz3777
250 euros I read for 8 core which is around 300 US dollars, if true I will get one for sure. If its $500 and up outta my budget. They sure are taking long for the release wow Intel has dropped 3 or 4 new gen CPUs since talk started about zen, what is amd doing baking one at a time in an oven or something? What's taking so long???
SSD_PRO
I hope you are wrong. At 600 for the CPU alone what we have is a great upgrade for a small number of enthusiasts and a market failure. For the average buyer 300 is the limit and Intel has now stretched that to 400. At 600 we have a niche market and nothing disrupting Intel. Intel is capable of selling 8 core parts maintaining exponential revenue if they sell 8 core units at 700. If AMD only goes 600, nothing changes. Intel will always have the more developed and more reliable product because of their R&D and engineering investment. AMD just doesn't have the cash to engineer with the same reliability.
Case and point.
PrMinisterGR
The 600 value would obviously have meaning with current Intel CPU prices.
Forebode
They neglected to say if the chip would support higher clocks. In the comparison they underclocked a 6900k from 3.20/3.7 to 3. so what if its a lil better than it at 3ghz? compare stock vs stock speeds. It would be great for AMD to be comparable again, but they need to be realistic with comparisons out of the gate.
Kaarme
Intel was much, much ahead with the smaller process node technologies. On the other hand Intel kept releasing new CPUs that were pitifully similar to their predecessors. The only added value has been more or less things like new sata, PCIe, and usb versions. I upgraded from Ivy Bridge i5k to Skylake i5k and got 10% more processing power. There were two bloody generations between these CPUs, meaning Skylake is three generations newer. And I got 10% more ipc. Did I get more cores/threads? Of course not.
In short, AMD has done nothing for years and Intel has kept releasing the same old **** under different names for years. It's so nice to be a computer hobbyist in these exciting times! Oh yeah!
schmidtbag
People's skepticism seems to be getting a lot more... harsh lately. Back in the Bulldozer days it was more like "overhyped - I doubt it'll outperform an i7" but with Zen it's more like "I'm better than you as a person because I'm not buying AMD". Calm down people, it's just a CPU...
Anyway, I hope the B350 chipset will make it to mini ITX boards and will offer overclocking. I'm a bit confused about the chipset though, because many sources seem to say very different things about what it can and can't do. If I can get a single 16x gen 3 PCIe slot and an M.2 slot in a mini ITX board, I'm happy. Though, I doubt there are any GPUs that can take advantage beyond 8x on gen 3 anyway.
Stormyandcold
Well, it's AMD's one chance to get back in the game, so, they have to take their time and things like one product-line helps due to costs involved already.
I think it'll be competitive price-wise. Performance-wise; for gamers the difference between AMD vs Intel will be small.
Unless you're into video/music production, editing etc most users won't notice the difference.
For me, it would probably allow me to run more virtual instruments (upto double what I'm using now) in a daw in real-time, while keeping latencies low.
schmidtbag
I agree - AMD needs to make sure they're doing things right. Though at this point I'm pretty sure they're completely done with their engineering and they're just in production. That includes getting OSes up-to-date with microcode and schedulers, getting compilers up-to-date, checking for stability issues, waiting for motherboard manufacturers to finish their work, as well as Global Foundries. That's a lot to get done in a few months, but thankfully for AMD, they're not responsible for doing all of that themselves.
Depending on what you're expecting for gaming, the performance difference will be irrelevant. Many people just look at the maximum framerate but not the framerate they'll actually be playing at. The average person has a 60Hz monitor, so once you turn on vsync, the extra 10FPS you get from a more expensive product really doesn't matter as long as you reach 60. With DX12, Vulkan, and multi-threaded rendering on the rise, the CPU is becoming even less important than it used to be. As long as latency is good, that's all that really matters at this point.
Agent-A01
Too much hype IMO.
History can repeat itself.
AMD hyped bulldozer, showed a couple benchmarks where it was faster than the i7, when in actuality it wasn't even close in most scenarios.
Of course i hope they destroy the i7 for a good price as Intel is twiddling their fingers; not much effort is being put in to give us a much faster product plus the stupid pricing needs to be changed.
PhazeDelta1
If it's faster than their previous CPU, I'd call that a success.
schmidtbag
Agreed - Excavator's performance is roughly on-par with Sandy Bridge, but the problem is the only way to get it is mainstream, laptop, or low-end parts. So, it's somewhat irrelevant to us enthusiasts. Even if Zen's apparently 40% improvement over Excavator is a cherry-picked result (which it likely is) and is more like 15% faster on average, it'll still be a good product. I'm not expecting it'll beat Skylake, but still be on the same playing field.
H83
That´s exactly what i´m hoping for in terms of price! No matter how good Zen is, it can´t cost more than Intel´s Core i7 6700K\7700K otherwise AMD won´t gain any marketshare that they really need.
I´m thinking that Zen CPU´s and motherboards are going to be cheaper by around 20 to 30% compared to similar Intel parts otherwise people are going to continue to buy Intel... But i could be wrong...
PrMinisterGR
I can't see a true 8/16 CPU being sold at the same price as a quad with similar IPC.
