KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
AMD is set to take on Intel once again this year with the launch of its highly anticipated Zen architecture processors. While Socket AM4 is currently poised to launch for some APUs fairly early this year, Zen CPUs won't be arriving until a bit later, with current sources pointing towards an October launch date.
According to a source supposedly close with AMD, (via wccftech), the first Zen/Summit Ridge processor will be an eight-core offering, with dies already taped out and currently being validated through testing. A release is then apparently scheduled for October.
The report also notes that the future Socket AM4 CPU will have a 95W TDP, putting it in-line with Intel's current high-performance mainstream desktop processors in terms of power consumption.
As always when dealing with unofficial information, it is important to note that plans could change and delays could happen. This is also an anonymous source so do take it with a grain of salt. That said, We have been expecting a late 2016 release and an October date would fit that bracket.
KitGuru Says: AMD is finally gearing up to launch the Zen architecture alongside a new ‘unified' AM4 platform that will support both APUs and new CPUs. Are any of you currently waiting on Zen?
Truly make or break for the CPU side of AMD
Their first crack at 14nm, from the long delayed 14nm process from global foundries.
Not as good as intel’s 14nm process, which is now in 2nd gen with skylake, and going to third gen with kaby lake. Intel has had significant time to refine this process and thus can keep prices low when the time comes, whereas TSMC and Global Foundries has spent a fortune to get here, being long overdue, can they afford to make these parts cheap?
Tough question…
and…
Has AMD whipped up a stunning powerhouse design? Or is what we all pretty much expect, and thus isn’t even as good as intel’s first gen 14nm broadwell parts… Bulldozer and excavator ironically were really just clearing the landfill to bury Zen in?
I remain highly skeptical of AMD, even though I don’t want them to die off. I expect everyone to see the performance and the price and go “meh”, but I hope for something much more! 2016 is a big year for new CPU and GPU parts!
you guys kind of also talked about this last year too
http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-set-to-release-first-zen-based-microprocessors-in-late-2016-document/
not that I am calling BS on this, if this truly is accurate, I am happy that the schedule is accurate, I am just saying that this has been stated before
I was expecting something like a December launch. So if this is true I’ll be happy that there finally will be competition.
LPP is 2nd generation 14nm too. 1st gen was LPE. Foundries are already working on 3rd generation finfet nodes. So I think for the moment architecture will be more important than node. I accept that Intel’s foundry is more advanced though.
I expect zen is to priced as it performs when it’s available easily(2017) and initial cost to be higher. Performance per core should be like haswell but more tuned for server performance than consumer workloads or gaming.
The same source this article quotes, also states that IPC of Zen is closer to Broadwell than in-between Ivy Bridge and Haswell like I was expecting. As for Zen being geared towards servers instead of where the majority of users are, I really don’t think AMD has done that this time around. I have a feeling that the Opterons have a few unique features that’ll allow AMD to target both markets with two almost identical chips.
Waiting for APUs based on this techology – YEAH!!
To be accurate the true anonymous source from where WCCFTECH got its article wrote “IPC Efficiency”, not IPC, but he also wrote blatantly false information (like when he said that Samsung 14nm is superior to Intel 14nm).
Zen is geared towards servers and the reason for microarchitectural choices like SMT and up to 32core counts. Servers is where the money is, not in a falling PC market.
October!
agree with you never trust wccftech because most of what their post is rumour and speculation than what real thing is. i lend toward haswell performance in this regard.
p/s still running on my phenom iix3 720BE overclocked at 3.4 GHZ with unlock 4th core
Bring it on,
“via wccftech” bwahahaha
Thanks to intel’s extreme generational milking, it’s nowhere near as hard for AMD to make up lost ground as people seem to think… Think Puma+ doubled in relative size with exclusive L2 and a healthy 8MB shared L3, with optimizations for slightly higher clocks (2.9-3.5GHz). It’s worth noting this would still only be a pinch larger than the minuscule 3.1mm2 of cat cores in absolute terms thanks to 14nm finfet. 200mm2 ±10% octacores under 95W would trounce intel’s current offerings in price/performance and be absolutely phenomenal for DX12/Vulkan gaming as well.
WCCTECH: World Cretin Central Feeding Tech
I simply want AMD to compete, even if they can’t beat intel, as long as they are close enough in performance and offer a better value, that’ll help keep prices down and facilitate faster innovation. In the end, a big win for us end users if AMD can truly compete with intel.
looking forward to see what they can do.
a skylake plater cost 10.000$ so at perfect node an i5 should come to 50$ per chip where if they would remove graphic it would come to down to 35$ well nothing is perfect but that does not justify selling those thing at 400$ and intel sell way less technology then tsmc and samsung so cost to recuperate are higher so if they have good node amd could get out 8 core for about 50$ to 100$ plater + technology tax
maybe the market is falling because of lack of competition where people wonder why upgrade for little performance gain and see intel stuck on 2007 quad core and useless igpu… unless you pay big buck
The real point of interest should be how does it perform? Pretty sure they will launch in 2016 even if it might be with limited availability like Skylake was at launch. None of it matters if they launch in volumes and it doesn’t meet reasonable performance levels to win back some sales.
AMD has claimed that they hit their performance targets, so I’m hopefully optimistic here.
Yeah but bulldozer PR shenanigans are still in many people’s minds me included but I am personally pretty confident they wont that sort of monumental mistake again. Though they are still a bit inclined to twist facts to suit a marketing angle like the claims with Fury X being the fastest card over the 980Ti (stock) by some margins in some cases, that was until we saw the settings they used. Then there was the Fury X being the overclocker’s dream that was just a poor own goal. This sort of thing applies to their 40% IPC increase claims, sure they are not lying but what did they really test in their internal tests? Only they know. We all know how notoriously misleading certain benchmarks can be depending on what you aim to show off.
You mean like the ones Intel uses and “endorses”?
Oh no they wont obviously use those but they have internal set of benchmarks they call Traces, that is specific to every company’s philosophy. That doesn’t necessarily need to translate to what we have today in the market. This has something to do with SystemC 2.0 not being robust enough for full OS and app simulations yet. SystemC is what system architects use to model these CPUs even before any actual design are made.
I will get a ZEN in 2017. In 2018… upgrade from HBM GPU to HBM2. obviously I’ll need a new board for ‘Zen.’ Maybe AMD will support PCIE 3.0 when ZEN is released. But then PCIE 4.0 will be released. I am an AMD fanboy. I love Intel and NVIDIA too. But it is the side I chose. Maybe its the customer service I’ve gotten with them. They’ve always treated me well.
Zen will support PCIe 3.0, as Steamroller and Excavator already do.
Right now I have a 9590 FX 8-core processor. It doesn’t support 3.0.
The AM3+ socket doesn’t support PCIe 3.0. FM2+ does, and therefore AM4 will.
Let’s hope it’s 8 real cores each with hyper-threading i.e. 16 logical cores 🙂
That’s pretty much a given at this point. We know that’ll be the top-end of the AM4 chips.
I am a loyal AMD customer but I am tired of how slow they are to release New CPUs. I want to go to DDR4, hurry AMD and release ZEN!
I’m thinking AMD is probably gonna surprise the crap out of many people. I hope to see quite a few people eat humble pie and a large glass of reality check to wash said humble pie down with. We will see though. AMD needs to shoot some life back into the stagnated market that is the PC industry.
Hmmm
Actually AMD has 16 logical core server chips slated for release as well. In point of fact for a while AMD was giving intel a run for its money in the low-mid range server market. That is where the real money in processors is to be found.
worth the wait
Zen
– 512KB Cache L2 per core
– 16 MB Cache L3
– 8 full cores
– 8 virtual
Skylake i7-6700
– 256KB per core
– 8 MB cache L3
– 4 full cores
– 4 virtual
http://semiaccurate.com/2016/05/22/38688/
False.
Zen is 512 kB L2 per core, 8 MB per four cores, with SMT.
Skylake is 256 kB L2 per core, 8 MB per core cores, with SMT.
Zen 8-core = 2 MB L2 + 16 MB L3 + 8 physical, 16 logical
Skylake 4-core = 1 MB L2 + 8 MB L3 + 4 physical, 8 logical
Hardly a fair comparison. You should be comparing it to Haswell’s 8-core i7 XE:
Zen 8-core = 2 MB L2 + 16 MB L3 + 8 physical, 16 logical
Haswell 8-core = 2 MB L2 + 20 MB L3 + 8 physical, 16 logical
sftu INTEL fanboy youd data be incorrect.. i let the source so get back to your cave troll 😉
There is nothing incorrect there, and that source says absolutely nothing about Skylake’s configuration.
By giving AMD more of a lead than you are (comparing it to 8-core Haswell, instead of 4-core Skylake), I’m somehow the Intel fanboy? What?
im comparing with i7-6700 his real competitor by prices 😉
And I was comparing performance. You did mess up the configurations though. Both have SMT, so the 6700K has 8 threads, and the 8-core Zen has 16.
i agree ^^
Yeah saw that but will wait for launch to see by just how much they have improved semicarruate’s armchair internetz CPU designers are not to be taken seriously.
It will be better than Bulldozer, even Sandy bridge level of performance would great at this point. Anything better is icing on the cake I am building a zen based PC that’s for sure.
i see Zen in worst case between haswell and broadwell but in than level its poinless if bring all that improvements by same price.
I think Zen will be competitive with Broadwell’s 8-core. There are reasons why Intel decided to up the core count to 10 this time around. They stuck with 6 cores for two architectures, they could have stayed with 8 cores for two more, but *something* made them decide otherwise… Nevertheless, even at Haswell performance, I’ll be grabbing one. I’m currently using an Intel Core2 Duo laptop, although I’ve managed to source an AMD APU system for £50 from a friend that’ll keep me going until Zen is here.
AMD will never price it close to Intel, they need to be aggressive to win over the enthusiasts quickly. AMD doesn’t Intel’s margins to get into healthy profitability. Though it must be said scümbag Intel will probably start price wars just to strangle AMD as Intel can afford to take the hit on their margins.
actually is 16 virtual they said it in E3
If you want to go DDR4 then go Skylake now.
i think im gonna wait till pcie4 coems out and then decide amd or intel depending on price and performance wise and expandability and upgradability and stabability and stuff
i have quad core qx6800 cpu works perfectly for today stuff and running agp ati 4670 his 1gb graphic card works perfectly as well running windows 10 pro and 7 pro both 32 bit as 64 bit does not like my motherboard
yea i still have q8400 and play everything fine but i upgrade my 6770 since 1gb of ram was not enough so i upgraded to 7950 flex for 80$ cad so about 58$ usd
Luckily the computer I got has 3.25gb ram usable out of 4gb from modded bios. Running in 4coredual vsta motherboard.
nice 🙂
still using 1gb vram lol though my computer says 4gb available in dxdiag.