AMD Releases More Architecture Details on ZEN
Click here to post a comment for AMD Releases More Architecture Details on ZEN on our message forum
hijodeosiris
Can someone give us a TLDR for tech dummies (I Like tech but by any mean i do understand like 95% of that thingies) Thanks i guess.
LimitbreakOr
Zen is looking really good on paper, i hope amd delivers.
Kaarme
Still missing the most important piece of information we don't yet know officially: The default clocks. The fact they aren't including them makes me worried. It seems unlikely it could match Intel's CPUs with much lower clocks, so what are they afraid of? AMD's GPU architecture is different from Nvidia's, which explains the unfortunate clock restrictions of Polaris, but AMD's CPUs shouldn't be crippled in a similar manner, unless Samsung's process technology sucks.
__hollywood|meo
its a significant step up from previous designs in efficiency & complexity. the cores dont share resources (aside from the cache) & that plus a much stronger instruction per clock means that these chips might be pretty damn competitive if theyre priced right.
Yogi
Just a wild guess, but maybe they're waiting on a statistically significant number of chips to be fabricated so they can determine the best compromise of yield vs clockspeed vs thermals?
Does anybody know how long it takes to process a 14/16nm wafer compared to say a 28nm wafer and what kind of chip quantities are nested on each wafer?
-Tj-
For 8core variant
Base is 3Ghz, turbo is yet to be revealed. Im guessing 3.4 or up to 3.6Ghz.
Loophole35
That would be a good starting point. Once the chip matures and a few revisions happen I hope this CPU smacks Intel down a rung or two.
Picolete
Depends on the size of the chips(mm²)
LimitbreakOr
You can't say that the base is 3ghz, the only thing we know is that based on a on a highly unreliable source that the engineering sample is 3ghz which says nothing about the final product except that its a minimum of 3ghz if the rumor is valid.
Personally, I think that the bench was a probably a fake.
schmidtbag
Maybe I'm mistaken but I thought there was also going to be a 6-core release? That's the one I'd prefer. I don't really care about having a 16-threaded CPU. By the time I can actually take advantage of that many threads, I'm going to want something new. I just want enough threads to keep up with games (which will likely remain at 8 threads in most cases, due to the consoles) with a little extra for things like VR-specific processes.
I suppose if there isn't a 6-core, I'll go for the 4-core. Knowing AMD's upgrade path, the quad core will likely hold me over until they're capable of working out better revisions. I suspect the 2nd release of Zen will be significantly improved.
sverek
You talking about Intel CPUs.
Zen looks like it all about core count.
schmidtbag
Huh? Each Zen core has 2 threads.
vbetts
Moderator
I just want the Zen APU!
Loophole35
4c/8t with a full Polaris 10 GPU!!!!!! Count me in. That is an awesome budget rig.
Chris16v
Really looking forward to a full review. Heres hoping its good and the price is right too!
Aura89
the "default clocks" don't mean anything, so how is that the most important piece of information?
tsunami231
i wonder how much STP they gona sacrifice for those 24c chips but like i been saying the DAY software actual use multi core/thread correctly and scale correctly AMD will be laughing to the bank, Atlest till Intel actual tries to make better chip
schmidtbag
Why would the 24 core chips perform worse for STP than the 4 or 8 cores? Anyway even if that is the case, I don't suspect that really matters. Once you go beyond 8 cores, single-threaded tasks [generally] are no longer a priority or concern.
sykozis
Default clocks are only meaningless if you're planning to buy the product regardless of it's performance. Being that this could easily be a "make or break" product for AMD, it has to clock high enough to be competitive. At the clock rate indicated by the supposed leaks, it's not going to perform well enough to compete with Intel.
tsunami231
clocks dont really matter its the STP that does. Majority of programs arnt multi core thread aware of 4 so 4 core, 6 core 8, core 24core, it dont mater how they performace if programs cant use the cores in meaningfull way, More core are nice but not at the sacrifice of STP which what is king still these days
Untill "ALL" programs become multicore aware STP will be remain king. which is gona be while even with the claims of DX12 and dev are lazy about that.
