Intel's strong IPC will help its CPU's cope with games aiming to make good use of more than 4 cores, sure they will be near maxed out, but this ability greatly helps the transition to higher core count CPUs without leaving owners at much of a disadvantage. Its not a process that will happen overnight as the whole industry has evolved around 2 and now 4 core CPUs as the most desired gaming PC. Chris Roberts promised that his upcoming Star Citizen game will be capable of making use of all the PC hardware gaming enthusiasts can throw at it, including extra CPU cores/threads. The Star Citizen devs spoke about how it turns out the most efficient number of cores their chosen game engine (Cryengine) is happy with is 6 threads. They said Sure if pushed they can break game code into many more threads than 6, but you start introducing more an more inefficiency actually lowering performance beyond about 6 threads for the most part. It seems to me that over the years game engines have evolved from 1 to 2 to 4 CPU cores as the ideal. Sure that will change again but it is a slow process. This time going to 6+ will be relatively quick now perhaps pushed on by the weak many core consoles and the desire to use game engines capable of easily porting games between the PC's and console. As soon as Intel feel their sticking to 4 cores is hurting, they will have fair priced (by Intel standards lol) 6 cores CPUs ready for market in no time at all. Their greed and desire to push 4 core sales as long as possible has really given AMD the breathing room it needed + ofc when that transition does start to properly motivate towards 6+ cores they will sell many more CPUs. I cannot wait to see AMD get a Good CPU out and see that company be able to stand up straight again giving Intel some real competition along with the consumers some great options 🙂

^I really don't get this. Why do you want a higher number of cores when the draw calls are issued on one thread? Do you know how limited DX11 is by design? They are making terrible hacks and offloads in order to make the game utilize more of the CPU. They are offloading tasks that belong on the GPU to the CPU which is poorly suited for most of that workload. Just because you see your CPU being used doesn't mean it's being used effectively. You're calling out Intel for being greedy but I own a 5-year-old CPU from them and I still don't see any bottlenecks in games. How is that greedy?

That rumor has been around for a while. I wouldn't put too much into it.

Ah, thanks. Must have missed it. Well as any rumor I'll take it with some salt.

Isn't that the chicken or the egg question? Obviously nobody would make games requiring more cores if only 2% of buyers had the cores required. With Intel controlling the market, it decided how many cores people have and thus software houses had to stick to that number. If Intel had shifted i5 and i7 (midrange) to 6 cores a few years ago, you would most certainly already see games recommending if not requiring 6 cores.

It's not that easy because some games are inherently CPU heavy, RTS and MMO games in particular. You can optimize as much as you want on DX11, the fact of the matter is that once thread communicates with the GPU and one thread alone. Why do you need so many cores? Intel stuck to the formula that work: few fast cores. AMD experimented with many slow cores and they paid dearly for it. Why would Intel make AMD's mistake when the consumer market was clearly not ready for 8-core processors? Don't get me wrong, I'd have liked 8 cores. But only because I 3D render as a hobby. There was absolutely 0 use for more than 4 cores for gaming. Hell, even those i3s freaking murder AMD's CPUs in games. Per-core performance is the name of the game in DX11. Again I repeat, it is only now with DX12 that we're ready for more cores for games.

I cannot wait to see what Zen delivers, If it delivers at all.If they cannot match Haswell then why boder making the damm thing haha? Think I will start collecting box-art from Amd hehe, so far I have a Fx 6300 box,A10 7870k, and a Amd ssd. Honey have you seen my Amd underwear anywhere,the future is fusion you know?!

I've changed my overclocked fx8350 to 4690k two days ago, and this cpu is beating the living hell out of my previous cpu in games, even at stock 3.5. Well, in dx12 the difference isn't that much, but this cpu is still faster at stock. More cores, yeah... No thx, not anymore.

I know I mentioned I am waiting for APU's but I'm gonna drill down on that reason... One area where AMD is lacking with their APU's, is the CPU core IPC. The iGPU's inside the APU's are pretty reasonable, games that aren't cpu intensive and more gpu intensive show this. Having a stronger IPC will really help them out. Memory controller as well, with Kavari AMD really got it right with their memory controllers finally for the APU's. They scale very well on different memory speeds, in fact overclocking your memory and gpu cores on an APU show the most growth(CPU core overclocking does not show much improvement). Moving to DDR4 memory would be a much needed boost for these APU's.

I'm holding off an upgrade until I see the results of this. As long as it offers a similar or better performance-per-watt than Broadwell while costing less, that's all I need. I'll likely get the 6 core since most games still don't really take advantage of 8 (most don't take advantage of 6 either, but the extra 2 cores is good for running other tasks in the background).

IF, and there are a lot of ifs, Zen offers 8 true cores at near Haswell IPC with more PCIe lanes, then it will be faster than all mainstream i7s. Games do use those extra cores, and no matter what you hyperthread, an actual core will be better. Can't wait for some actual tests damnit!

IF, and there are a lot of ifs, Zen offers 8 true cores at near Haswell IPC with more PCIe lanes, then it will be faster than all mainstream i7s. Games do use those extra cores, and no matter what you hyperthread, an actual core will be better. Can't wait for some actual tests damnit!

To my knowledge, Zen will not offer a true 8-core. It's still the same module system that the current generation uses, except more refined. AMD does intend to increase their IPC (thankfully), though we don't know by how much. And yes, true cores are better than HT, so even if it's 4-module/8-core chip, it could still be pretty competitive. There are games these days that support more than 4 cores, but they're still pretty uncommon. Most such games are bottlenecked by the GPU. I'd wager that an overclocked 6-core is going to handle everything an 8-core can do in the next few years. But, if the price gap between the two only ends up being maybe $20, then paying extra would be worth it.

To my knowledge, Zen will not offer a true 8-core. It's still the same module system that the current generation uses, except more refined. AMD does intend to increase their IPC (thankfully), though we don't know by how much. And yes, true cores are better than HT, so even if it's 4-module/8-core chip, it could still be pretty competitive. There are games these days that support more than 4 cores, but they're still pretty uncommon. Most such games are bottlenecked by the GPU. I'd wager that an overclocked 6-core is going to handle everything an 8-core can do in the next few years. But, if the price gap between the two only ends up being maybe $20, then paying extra would be worth it.

Not sure how the new modules are going to work, I read some rumors that there will be no more 1 FPU per 2 ALU bullsh!t. Which is understandable, they did get some flak because they didn't make it loud and clear that there are only 4 FPUs. AVX performance went down significantly as a result. I wonder what they're going to share within one module.

Not sure how the new modules are going to work, I read some rumors that there will be no more 1 FPU per 2 ALU bullsh!t. Which is understandable, they did get some flak because they didn't make it loud and clear that there are only 4 FPUs. AVX performance went down significantly as a result. I wonder what they're going to share within one module.

Maybe cache, maybe nothing.

http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/zen.jpg Seems a little confusing. When looking at the 8-core chips, I'm not sure if that means there are 4 integer schedulers and 4 floating point schedulers, or if there are 8 fetch/decode stages.

One Zen unit is 4C/8T. So while there is no reason to expect less than 4 Cores. I think it is reasonable to expect 1-unit Chips. Someone somewhere could just misunderstood difference between CMT and SMT. Saw that there are 8 threads min... Zen based APUs will have 4C/8T for sure, as that will be huge boost and remaining space on die is better off used for GCN instead of another 4C/8T unit.

I'm predicting ivy bridge performance at best. We'll see soon enough.

anything over sandy will be a threat to intel's vacations at mobile paradise

So it has 6pipelines per core/module, 8 cores on Zen is 48 vs 32 by "8core" 4 module Fx8350. imo that's some serious boost, also each block can do 512AVX or 8x 512, 8 core haswell can do 8x 256bit, Skylake e.g. 6700 or 6600K could do 4x 512bit, but its disabled.. Its only selected Xeon Skylake variants.

Why do you need so many cores? Intel stuck to the formula that work: few fast cores. AMD experimented with many slow cores and they paid dearly for it. Why would Intel make AMD's mistake when the consumer market was clearly not ready for 8-core processors?

Seems like you are forgetting Intel's more expensive i7s totally. They are no worse than the sons of old age 4 cores IPC wise, but they have more cores. Lots of happy owners right here at Guru3D. Would have gotten one myself if my pocketbook was thicker. That's how you increase the core count. Like I said before, it's useless to bring the miserable AMD offerings of recent years into this discussion. If you drastically drop the performance of every core in favour of more cores, you get a CPU intended for server use that shouldn't interest an average joe unless the price tricks them into getting one.

No dual core Zen , sound to be very bad thing for AMD. Is not about marketing . Many OEM manufacturers already have many i3 products of Intel , is very clear for me ,Zen can't compete core to core with Intel processors. So: 4 Zen cores ~ 2 Intel cores 6 Zen cores ~ 4 Intel cores 8 Zen ~ 6 core Intel. Intel octacores will have no competion

So it has 6pipelines per core/module, 8 cores on Zen is 48 vs 32 by "8core" 4 module Fx8350. imo that's some serious boost, also each block can do 512AVX or 8x 512, 8 core haswell can do 8x 256bit, but its disabled.. Its only selected Xeon Skylake variants.

6 wide machine , but that does not mean every single core to have 6 ALU . Back in time AMD Stars arhitecture , or K10, was the same a 6 wide core , but had 3 ALUs and 3 AGU . Intel skylake core, is also 6 wide , with 4 ALU and 2 AGU

Didn't you see the picture above by Excavator/Bulldozer its 8, but in reality 8 got split between 2 threads, so each core inside a module actually had max up to 4.. BY Zen its 6 but a single core/module can access all 6 at the same time, and it has 8 separate cores/modules, not max 4 like Buldozer/Vishera/Excavator I think Intel has 7 pipelines, this started with Haswell core+, anything bellow that used 5 since conroe days up to/including Ivy Bridge. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6355/intels-haswell-architecture/8

You made a confusion between pipelines and execution ports. Until Haswell all Intel processors was 4 wide machine with 6 execution ports. Next generations , mean Hasewell , Skylake are 6 wide machines (6 pipes) and 8 execution ports. Conroe was also 4 wide machine We are talking about CISC machines, that have front end (decoders that decode large instructions of CISC into micro ops like RISC that should be at the same lenght, then chache and buffers) , pipelines micro-op buffers (out of order OOO can execute micro ops ,not CISC instruction, in any order they arrive) and the final execution ports with ROB (re-oder buffer, final result is sequential as the program it self) . So even Haswell which is 6 wide machine is only 10 to 20% quicker than SandyBridge , but has 50% more resources . In fact even Skylake because of its executions ports can't execute more than 4 integers per clock, unlike SandyBridge that executes only 3 . So AMD tells 6 pipes, that doesn't tell me too much, not all that pipes can execute integer operations. Not all of them are ALU, a processor needs also adress generation unit aka AGU , load/store units etc. Not to mention for now we don't know about the front end not to mention how many executions ports ZEN have. In the end I think because they won't produce dual cores, the performance is not great. I suppose Zen core will be 20%-30% slower clock to clock than an Intel core

No dual core Zen , sound to be very bad thing for AMD. Is not about marketing . Many OEM manufacturers already have many i3 products of Intel , is very clear for me ,Zen can't compete core to core with Intel processors.

Quite strange it's so clear to you since nobody has seen the Zen chip yet. It's still many months off. There hasn't been even a paper launch yet, just talk and marketing speeches from AMD. In any case this all would be totally pointless if the cores were as weak as the currently available AMD technology. However, if they were, we wouldn't have got the kind of talk from AMD as we have. If AMD's genuine 4 core costs the same as Intel's 2 core + 2 placebo HT, then it's all good for AMD if the per core performance isn't that far from Intel's. If it still is far, then AMD is finished.