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New AMD Zen details have begun to surface

With AMD set to release its Zen architecture processors towards the end of this year, the company has begun giving out more details during its quarterly earnings call. This week, AMD reported its quarterly earnings and in that call, CEO Lisa Su revealed a few more details on the Zen architecture along with what we can expect and when to expect it.

Right now, AMD is in talks with PC makers to begin building systems using its codenamed Summit Ridge processors, which are based on the Zen architecture and may well be released under the ‘FX' brand during late 2016. These Summit Ridge CPUs will be the first high-performance desktop CPUs from AMD to use Zen, while chips for servers will appear in early 2017. Nothing was said about Zen APUs though we did hear some rumours recently– there is also no word on Zen for laptops just yet.

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We already know that AMD has high hopes for Zen and according to a previous report, the chip has managed to meet internal expectations with no significant bottlenecks found. Right now, Lisa Su is saying that AMD's Summit Ridge CPUs will be a “re-entry” into the high-performance desktop market for the company.

Lisa Su also spoke about performance a bit, saying that AMD's Zen-based CPU offers 40 percent more performance per cycle than Excavator cores, which are currently found in AMD's Carrizo chips. We still have a pretty long wait but we do know that Socket AM4 mat be launching fairly early this year around March though only APUs will be taking advantage of it at first, with Zen to follow later in the year. 

KitGuru Says: AMD is gearing up for a lot of launches in 2016, with the debut of Socket AM4, DDR4 support and the new Zen architecture. Are any of you looking forward to seeing how AMD's new CPUs perform? 

 

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107 comments

  1. What exactly is the new info regarding Zen here?

  2. Christopher Lennon

    none…it’s click bait

  3. Poor kitguru needs them baitclicks

  4. wtf.. its clickbait …

  5. I am really hoping for a great performer here. 2016 will most likely be the year I upgrade my aging 920 (if not for anything, at least for the noise produced by trying to cool the poor thing). I am really hoping Zen will be a strong contender so I could jump ship back to AMD

  6. I need an exact date so I can figure out how to save up for a new motherboard cpu and memory.

  7. Brian Edward Croner

    Zen CPU + Fury X2 GPU = VR + AR gamedev heaven

  8. I will believe it when I see it. I am a long term AMD CPU fan, currently running a 9590, under water, at 5ghz stable…but we were supposed to see 16 core CPUs, for desktops, by now. Come on guys! Don’t let us down…Intel is a socket whore! And if you do bring it out, STAY ON THE SAME SOCKET for at least 2-3 years dammit!

  9. It’s about time AMD started doing something, this seems as though it’s taken forever. They’ve sat on this old architecture for so long.

  10. when the performance leaps between releases are as pitiful as AMD’s, no new socket is needed.

  11. i don’t think that fury x2 is coming. if the production was feasible, it would have been released already.

  12. It was just delayed to coincide with major VR Headsets release. A dual GPU card is tricky to make so it surely needs the extra time.

  13. I think you should wait for Polaris architecture and see what it has to offer (HBM2 and new GCN core , 14 / 16 nm ) An Fury x2 with Polaris arch. would be very interesting.

  14. I personally believe that AND can’t afford to invest the money to build such a card. But we can only speculate. By End of Q3, we’ll know for sure. If no dual fury announcement by then, it’s not happening.

  15. I was AMD loyal starting with the budget Opterons that could go from 1.5 to 2.5Ghz on air. However, I’ve since switched to Intel CPUs based on micro-atx board options AM3+ boards during my last build.

  16. Not to mention the performance gap. The I7 might cost a little more, but when you’re building a good machine, you might as well spend just a few more bucks on a CPU. The value versus performance just isn’t there anymore to stay brand loyal.

  17. Mass availability of zen will be in 2017. You may have to wait more or go intel.

  18. a little more? the 6600k is over £330 on its own!

  19. Curious, at 5Ghz what is your average power draw and what’s the max you’ve seen? Do you play any of the recent AAA games? Gaming average power draw would be very interesting to know.

    Oh and before I forget, what graphics card are you using now? Overclocked or stock?

  20. The i7-6700k is £323 on Scan right now.

  21. On the one hand I know we need AMD in the market to compete with Intel, on the other I know this CPU will be late to the game by over a year and potentially underwhelm.

  22. Just plan for October 27th.

    $160 for the motherboard, $290 for the CPU, and $100 for the RAM.

    That’s what I’m doing :p

  23. What makes me sick about most people is they obviously don’t know the history of x86… First chip @ 1GHz, AMD, first real dual core, AMD, first IMC, AMD… Desktop 64bit, AMD, first quad core AMD, first real APU, AMD…

    They just have a very bad competitor… And a bunch of weak-kneed OEMs…

  24. And the FX 9590 is almost half that. Yet definitely delivers more than 50% of its performance.

  25. Hope you are correct. That’s about the exact time I was planning an upgrade as the new GPUs will also be out.

  26. Well true, I mean Intel did get fined on the big for anticompetitive actions. (even though I’ve turned to the dark side now after and long AMD affiliation)

  27. I got a whole tower, lazy builder me, 6600k, 8gb ddr4, 1tb mech, 960 nvidia 2gb, mother board, PSU and case for 599.99 inc vat, so id think £330 is a bit much ?

  28. that’s an i5 that is more than £100 less than the 6700k. Cheapest I can find for the i7 is £310.

  29. In my place i don’t care for power draw as long it is stable don’t know about 5Ghz tho but might or might not be possible.

  30. When the FX-X300 series came out, they had better increases in performance compared to the last generation than Intel managed with Ivy-Bridge and Haswell. Intel had bumps around 3-5% each time, while Vishera increased about 6-8%. The problem was of course that the gap to Intel was still freakin’ huge and not very enticing.

  31. 5Ghz is possible check the FX9xxx series. also some fx8xxx series can be oc’ed stable to 5Ghz

  32. AVA Werido Aka papa smurf

    are you sure its coming out that time thought ??

  33. http://valid.x86.fr/sux4l5 Ohh its very possible and if you know what you’re doing its worth it , From a FX6100 to FX8350 both are decent at their stock speed but the amount of overclocking headroom is insane for both of these chips not to mention the performance boost is incredible .

  34. To be honest I don’t like Intel or nvidia tactics. The only reason I have an Intel CPU is cause they are better right now, and getting a GTX 970 was a mistake (shoulda got a r9 390). My next gpu will probably be Polaris gen 1 or gen 2, and if I do upgrade my CPU soon I will definitely get a zen one.

  35. I’ve been on the dark side for years but I want to go back to AMD on the cpu, already there with the gpu but what put me off on the cpu is the power consumption was too high for the performance it was giving, so if Zen lowers power consumption a lot and the performance is more in line with higher end Intel chip then I’ll jump ship in a heartbeat, can’t stand Intel and Nvidia and there greed which has been getting worse over the years.

  36. It takes 4-5 years, minimum under the best circumstances, to go from, “Hey we need a new CPU architecture,” to “Hey, here’s our new CPU architecture.”

    If they started the very base work on Zen right as the very first Bulldozer-based processors were hitting store shelves, releasing it in the second half of this year is pretty much right on time.

  37. What details are new, exactly? 40% IPC improvement over Excavator? Not new. AM4 launching this year with APUs? Not new. Met internal expectations with no significant bottlenecks? Not new. Zen is a “re-entry” into high-performance desktop market? Not new. Zen FX chips due late this year? Not new. AMD in talks with PC makers to use Zen? Well, obviously.

    Unless I’m missing something, there isn’t anything “new” in this story at all.

  38. Click bait article. lol

    More interesting is reminding myself of the benefits Asynchronous compute SHOULD bring when devs get the chance to implement it properly in a PC title.

    http://www.gpunit.com/index.php/2016/01/20/amd-vs-nvidia-asynchronous-compute-engines-aces-in-a-nutshell/

  39. And yet uses more than 100% more power :/ 200 for the FX other 95W for the Skylake.

  40. I grabbed some components lately. i7-6700k, Corsair 16GB DDR4 3200MHz, Asus z170i “Pro Gaming” (got it for it’s Wifi and features rather than the gaming stuff), Corsair H100i GTX, Corsair Obsidian 250D, eVGA 750W PSU (the one with 10 year warranty), a 4TB SSHD and a Samsung 256GB NVMe M.2 SSD and a Gigabyte 980GTX. Come to £1300ish.

    EDIT:

    Out of sheer sense of responsibility, anyone reading this, the H100i GTX is not compatible with the Corsair 250D. You need the H100i. I’ve had to ghetto rig it.

  41. I’ll be buying a ASUS ROG motherboard all based on Socket AM4 and ZEN.

  42. Well Said. But there’s more: Where AMD leads, Intel follows. Because if it was the other way around, AMD would have been out of business a long time ago.

    x86 microprocessor innovations, AMD has shown the way
    First superscalar RISC – K5
    First to use “Flip-Chip” technology – K6
    First on-chip L2 cache – K6-3
    First use of copper interconnects – K7
    First fully pipelined, superscalar floating point unit – K7
    First to extend x86 to 64-bits (AMD64) – K8
    First to release a Dual-Core – Athlon 64 x2
    First to release a Tri-Core – Phenom II
    First to release a Quad-Core – Phenom II
    First to release a 6-Core – Bulldozer
    First to release a 8-Core – Bulldozer
    ETC…

    Role reversal: How it might have been
    If there had been a role reversal between Intel and AMD – that is, Intel had developed what AMD had brought to market and AMD had done the same with Intel’s technology – AMD would have failed as a going concern long before this day.
    http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1011948/where-amd-leads-intel-follows

  43. The problem with increased clock speeds on either of those CPU’s is somewhat meaningless per say. Piledriver cores don’t have a large enough impact performance wise with higher clocks. But still, its enough to justify an OC of course.

    I have the FX-8350 running all 8-Cores at 4.7GHz Rock Stable. And been running like this for years now. Temps run quite cool.

  44. No it’s not 6700K is that price or less 6600K is no where near £300

  45. I built my first custom machine with an athlon x64 and have built primarily AMD systems since. Although yes, they have been the first, being the first doesn’t mean it was, or is, the best. Correlating with the launch of the “first true dual core” you see the beginning of what would become the huge divide of marketshare.

  46. Minor correction AMD’s first dual core was the Phenom I.

  47. I would have to disagree from the benchmark and gaming ive done with both of them chips heavily OD’ed, 24/7 both of those chips ran no lower than 4.8ghz and peaked at 5.2ghz with the 6100 and 5.3ghz with the 8350 and the only thing that stopped me there was needing a custom water loop, Had the original H100 with the 6100 and now the H100i extreme with the 8350.. Just curious witth your oc, is it all multi or a mix of multi and FSB ?

  48. I mean, if you’re going 6600K, there are other I7’s aside from that one like the 4790K that isn’t as expensive, I haven’t looked in a while, but does AMD have a processor that can keep up with that one right now? I’m not sure if things have changed, but like I said before, the matx market for AM3+ is awful.

  49. My Samsung M.2 died within a year in my laptop. I hope it fairs better in a case. I’m sure it will.

  50. But everybody knows performance and cost is not a linear relationship. The closer to the edge, the more it cost, and you’re also future proofing. I’m not knocking AMD by any means. Unless you’re an ultra power or somebody who can spare the extra cash for the build, that extra money would be better served to go towards an SSD or a better graphics card.

  51. This is underneath the motherboard :/

    I’m pretty good a politely complaining about these things though. I’ve heard Scan are a nightmare to return items to, but you get 24 months to return faulty items.

  52. Christer Nonne Nilsson

    I guess you can google it and found out but here is link and info from AMD´s homepage, if Phenom II was first I guess they would have put that on their own homepage too??

    2005
    AMD introduces AMD Turion™ 64 mobile technology for notebook PCs and AMD Athlon™ 64 X 2 dual-core processor for desktop.

    2004
    AMD demonstrates world’s first x86 dual-core processor

    http://www.amd.com/en-us/who-we-are/corporate-information/history

  53. Not quite.
    The 16 core is the max possible on the AM4 socket.
    But the biggest one they intend to release this year is an 8 core CPU with 16 threads.

  54. I believe that the current record that includes all cores on the 8350 is 8,77 GHz.
    The record with some cores disabled is even higher.
    4,8 GHz is achieved by almost everyone on the 8350 with a decent motherboard and OK cooling and 5,0 is common.

  55. They sort of have some worth buying on the budget laptop segment.
    Mostly due to the iGPU.
    But in overall performance they’re limited to things like the FX 8350.
    Decent chip but a bit long in the tooth.

  56. You are right, the surprising thing though is other sites are doing the exact same thing these days but they just copy their’s from wwcftech when wccftech recycles stuff a zillion times prior.

  57. That’s unfortunate. Intel doesn’t excite me right now. I used to like hopping camps based on performance and gains by new architectures, but it’s been just boring the past few years in the Intel arena. Performance is great, but if AMD offered something on par I’d prefer to get that instead just for some change and curiosity

  58. Before I upgraded to the 9590, which runs at 4.7ghz stock, I had an 8150 that I put under water and was able to get it to 4.3 with no problems.

  59. I am still running a pair of VaporX 5870s in Crossfire. Stock. My overall power draw isn’t great, but it isn’t awful either. I’d say about a total of 1100 Watts on average…it varies based on load. I am running a 1200 Watt PSU, and I haven’t had any problems. I am still researching which GPU I want to upgrade to. I have ran AMD/ATI GPUs for a long time, but I am not opposed to going with NVidia. The FuryX is the card I am leaning towards.

  60. I’ll be brutally honest with you Baron. No.

    You’re looking at it backwards, the reason AMD had to constantly add new things is because comparing themselves 1:1 against intel shows their shortcomings much clearer. AMD has played their cards very well in that respect.

    Don’t get me wrong I love AMD, and I hope they do well, competition is good for everyone. but over the last 20 years probably 95% of the time, intel would process your data faster. and in the end that’s what a cpu does. if you think Intel doesent do R and D like AMD does, well jeeze Nvidia has a bigger R and D budget than AMD/ati (now just amd) combined.

  61. Do the math.
    You’ll make up the difference and them some on your power bill (literally), but your programs will run faster.

  62. Phenom I was in 2008 and came with 4 cores. It was the bulldozer of its ERA as its power consumption and IPC were subpar compared to the competition where as Phenom II was better, however still lacking. Theres a good reason they wouldn’t mention it. You don’t toute failed sales as an achievement.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Phenom
    http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/131600756246?ul_noapp=true&chn=ps&lpid=82

    Stick with the AMD website, they’ll tell you the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. /s

  63. it’s a 4 year old architecture! what do you expect?

  64. Christer Nonne Nilsson

    Im not really sure what´s your point on this now?? Because I only replied to that Phenom I was “not” the 1st dual-core from AMD since that was Athlon64 X2!! They also released world first quad-core for servers 2006 that was before Phenom 1.

    2006
    AMD demonstrates the industry’s first native quad-core x86 server processor.

  65. bahahahahahah I made a typo. I meant quad core. Added an edit, while retaining my original comment to show thus. Sorry for the misunderstanding but its kinda funny.

  66. You have NO IDEA what you’re talking about… I mean what kind of idiot would say “You only add stuff because you have to…?”

    That’s like saying “I’m not racist, but…”

    KCID A TAE

  67. Those 2 things literally do not correlate. You can observe things about race but not be racist, you however cannot add for no reason. doesn’t justify the expenditure.

  68. Oddly enough, my 8350 has “2011” on its heat spreader.

  69. Assuming any of them do, Nvidia has been getting game devs to eschew Async and instead embrace the middling DX11.3 features that Nvidia baked into their hardware instead of Async.

  70. Christer Nonne Nilsson

    No problem, I think its kinda funny too check things up and so on. Really like AMD and hope they make it now with this new Zen CPU. 🙂

  71. Each zen core is projected by the PC community to have ~hawell performance (when taking into account 40% more of Bulldozers IPC and AMD touts it’ll have even more than simply 40%). 8 physical and 16 HTcores of that performance with a price that I HOPE is somewhere around $300-$400 while intel has a 10core process (with not much more IPC performance) at ~$1,200. I think AMD has basically had their success this year handed to them. If only they could’ve released sooner it would have given them much more cash flow in regards to annual fiscal performance.

  72. There is pressure mounting on AMD from their followers to make sure they show the difference async brings to pc gpus. They owe it to themselves and us to do that as well as the gpu community in general. This great technology should not be kept underground at the expense of moving tech forward.

  73. No, but it’s an estimate I made based on general time to market from known production milestones.

  74. MYOB…

  75. Sorry snowflake did i hurt your feelings? Must suck so bad to hear opinions in a public space. Is this the part where you remind us we better realize who you are?

  76. Some people just don’t learn… People who have been in tech for a long time can tell you how BaronMatrix feels…

    Like I said the guy is a useless Intel buyer… If Intel innovates, it’s because theyre great… If AMD does it’s because they have to catch up… Even if they do it first…

    THAT’S CRAZY… And why Intel gouges people to get a GPU that draws faster than by hand… You’re a bunch of suckers…

  77. And referring to oneself in the third person, golden. BaronMatrix hasn’t been taken seriously FYI. I remember you from some time ago, and thus far everywhere I’ve seen you commenting for the last 10 years, you’ve been proven wrong. You’re a fanboy that needs to learn what objectivity is. Unless amd is paying you, you owe them nothing, and they owe you nothing.

    You’re speaking to someone that has purchased and built solely AMD since my first and only purchased retail PC in the early 2000’s. From that first retail PC I would primarily build custom builds that are AMD. AMD has garbage CPU’s and intel has Great CPU’s in not only IPC but efficiency since sandy bridges release and bulldozers failure. This is an objective fact. Diverting the attention to what has happened in the past means nothing and shows your lack of argumentative skills by strawman. You can start saying “AMD CPU’s are great” again once Zen drops and has an 8 PhyCore 16HT CPU with comparable performance/IPC to haswell and is a fraction of the cost of Skylake 10Core CPU.

    In a production environment where IPC and power efficiency are key, Intel is currently the clear winner. In areas where IPC and power consumption don’t matter, AMD is fine.

  78. If only I thought enough of to write that much… I don’t… That’s why I destroyed TomzHW forums.. Assholes tempting the poet… And they invited me back after I left…

  79. Marshall Frampton

    Okay Okay, All of ye arguing, silence yourselves, easy as, AMD is amazing for budget builds that need a kick for not too much. Intel is much better, but for more expensive and more complex builds!

    Where AMD started, Intel wanted to go bigger where AMD didn’t, AMD and Intel have been at it for years, Intel wants power, and AMD doesn’t want to lose their namesake over CPU’s and be left with what Intel doesn’t have GPU’s

    AMD is amazing away from CPU’s, they have some decent GPU and RAM, though they are dwarfed by Nvidia and Corsair. They still fight multiple battles at once, if not for dominance, for being known as a great, cheap starting point, and an even better Logo, especially when you put it on the side of your case

    (I personally prefer Intel processors, especially the Haswell-E series, due to DDR4 Support and a good few cores to run all my applications)

  80. I have an 8130 that I get under water to 4.3 without problems. well taking into consideration that I kinda screwed it on stock cooling for 2 summers at 80deg Celsius while it doesn’t like more than 65deg

  81. Radeon 200 series card were so hot the dual gpu version needed water. Then their single GPU flagship needed water. AMD was using 5000MHz GDDR5 and said it was too power hungry (their entire design was too power hungry).

    Enter HBM and claiming GDDR5 was so poor and took up too much space on the PCB to justify their decision to ditch it.

    Meanwhile, Maxwell GPU’s were happily running at 7000MHz and overclockable up to 8000MHz, while beating Fiji cards with HBM and still using less power than AMD cards…

    AMD NEEDED HBM to counter the excessive power consumption. nVIDIA could easily destroy AMD using HBM 2 with GDDR5/X simply because they design more efficient architectures.

  82. it never made sense for AMD to use different sockets when the changes made on the motherboard (chipset) were pathetically minuscule it didn’t warrant it. It’s funny that you think AMD stayed on the same socket because of you. So basically you thought it made sense that the CPU makes all the difference and chipsets meant nothing all this time.

  83. Dude, get a life… HBM is a requirement for VR DUMMY… GDDR will never provide enough bandwidth…

    AMD and nVidia leap frog each other every generation and it’s healthy competition…

    Aren’t you supposed to go KCID A TAE…?

  84. Exactly who is ” the PC community”? You? Also, it is an IPC improvement of 40% over excavator, not bulldozer (BD). BD was rushed to market and quickly followed up by Piledriver (PD) which saw an large performance jump from some easy improvements on BD (the low hanging fruit). Some more improvements to BD were made aimed at improving very multithreaded performance in Steamroller (SR, the 3rd gen BD) and energy efficiency. This was repeated in the 4th gen BD, Excavator (EV), although here I think the main focus was energy efficiency and the SoC and GPU as it was aimed purely for laptops. All in all though, the BD architecture by now is pretty polished, probably there is already 40% IPC improvement alone going from BD to Excavator. Xen is expected to add 40% on top of that, plus SMT which doubles the threads and thus almost doubles the multithreaded performance and energy efficiency for the upper case of the most highly RAM intensive computing where the cores are waiting on the RAM.

    One big unknown is how much weighting the FPU intensive benchmarks are given in the IPC score. A 4GHz SR like the 7870k would match many i7 BOINC integer scores (the ones I browsed at least), yet their FPU BOINC scores would be absolutely lousy and comparable to older i3 (dual cores). (My 4+ year old llano laptop (four old k10 cores) will outperform any BD family quadcore at the same clock, in FPU intensive BOINC tasks).

    So my guess is the integer IPC performance boost of Zen is not going to be that dramatic over EV (since they were stellar to begin with), although the highly-multithreaded FPU IPC of course will double (50% jump) and be dramatic. So Zen will no longer take the hit in benchmarks which highly factor in FPU performance.

  85. …riiiiight…

  86. PC community, you know the community in which PC users communicate? You really try to jab with that “you?”? Most of that is exaggerated. Vishera is hardly better than bulldozer in nearly all areas not limited to IPC. You also have me on a technicality, hardly anyone remembers the names Vishera, Steamroller, Excavator however they remember the last chip AMD actually talked about, bulldozer. Hell, steamroller is hardly better than Bulldozer. Which is why there are no steamroller FX Cpus.

  87. “PC community, you know the community in which PC users communicate?” Or more precisely your perception of it which is based on your reading of a limited set of the actual PC community, and then filtered by your perception of it. You seem to imply that there is consensus, which there clearly isn’t, as it’s only a group of people’s guesses, and these guesses are based on far from sufficient information, so they’re going to range all over. Okay, that’s a minor point. Fact is, it’s anybody’s guess, and even after the fact, it will depend much on the rulestick you use–if you very much value FPU performance, you probably will be happy about Zen, and if you don’t, then you might be disappointed by the 40% improvement over excavator expectation.

    Now the second point that piledriver is just a slight improvement over bulldozer couldn’t be further from the truth. This jump was greatest among the three refinements of the BD family. The last two are very minor. The first is incredibly significant, as this is where they eliminated most of the flaws of the original BD release. You saw very significant improvements in all three areas: energy efficiency, clockrate, and IPC.

    http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/295/AMD_FX-Series_FX-6100_vs_AMD_FX-Series_FX-6300.html

    The second refinement traded off IPC improvement in very multithreaded (all cores loaded) situations for clockrate. The third and last refinement was mainly focused on further improving energy efficiency, especially when taken as a whole, as a SoC; they added instructions including a some special circuitry for H.265 decoding and made very slight IPC improvements which is somewhat of a mystery to me since they actually reduced L2 cache (I think by half? by that time RAM had gotten much faster, so that small size of L2 cache may not have hurt performance much, if at all, especially if they improved the speed and effectiveness of the cache, both L1 and L2 http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare_CPUs/AMD_AM740PDGH44JA,AMD_AM878PAIY43KA/ ).

    Were it not for the large number of cores in BD and the improved clocks, the first FX chips would not have been able to outperform Phenom II’s (which in reality actually still outperformed them in certain benchmarks, namely FPU intensive ones). The first APU (both laptop and desktop LLanos) was actually made using the old K10 cores, because BD was so energy inefficient per instruction. It’s only by the time PD was out that the new core had improved enough to surpass K10.

    You last point “Hell, steamroller is hardly better than Bulldozer. Which is why there are no steamroller FX Cpus.” While the second two refinements were smaller from desktop CPU considerations, the latter two added up, and are significant, especially for laptop or energy efficiency considerations. Together they add up to a very large jump. The reason there were no steamroller FX CPUs is that these AM3 socket CPUs are aimed for the desktop, and that one incremental refinement that was aimed more at laptops, did not justify fabbing a whole new line of desktop CPUs. This is understandable since AMD does not have wads of cash to throw around. Also, if you compare PD and SR quadcores, you see that IPC was traded off for clockspeeds and the net improvement in performance is insignificant. A better question would be why there are no lower clocked but energy efficient 8-core excavator CPUs; these would make great budget server chips in my opinion.

  88. TL;DR Would’ve put in a bit more effort if you were simply trying to bash, elitist. Learn some social skills.

  89. Wow, 1100 watts!! how did you manage to get to that figure? The reason why I am so shocked is because I am also using the 8370@ 5ghz and I am using two Fury x’s in crossfire, My psu is the AX1500i and under load the psu software that monitors power draw tells me the maximum draw I got was like 789 watts ( total draw) This was monitored while benching Metro Redux.

  90. I was estimating on the high side to be safe. I am running 2 SSDs and 2 HDDs, the 2 5870s, and a BDR. I will looking into benching it to make sure. Good to know that you can come in that low with the Fury X’s in crossfire. The 9590 does draw 220W native, but that shouldn’t be enough of a difference to push me as high as I thought I was running. I am very seriously considering the Fury X, so I need to benchmark my system and make sure I won’t push my PSU too far. It sounds like I won’t though. Thanks for the info!

  91. AVA Werido Aka papa smurf

    When will Polaris Come out Then Matey

  92. July 14th is the center of my original estimate, I haven’t bothered recalculating the number because I haven’t seen anything that suggests it would be way off.

  93. … So what are the new details?

  94. With the R9 Nano going for $479-499 these days they will be great for your power budgets. Up the powerlimit to 50% and it almost keeps that 1000-1010Mhz core clock for the most part. Given how overclocking the the Fijis seems to yield nothing much beyond 1050-1080Mhz the Fury X might not be that great of a choice. Or maybe you could wait to see how Polaris plays out for the overclocking scene.

  95. That software is known to be inaccurate by about ~5-8%, don’t know if they fixed it later on, still your 789 Watts is very impressive at max load. Would you mind finding out, unless you already know, the peak draw for your CPU alone in CPU heavy situations like transcoding or something of the sort? Much appreciated!

  96. My cpu alone at that overclock with all threads at load was like between 220 and 250 watts

  97. Thank for the info. Good thing 14nm LPP is very kind with Pmax vs Volt/fmax scaling, these gains will be very visible besides the uarch improvements AMD has put into Zen.

  98. AMD will never compete in the desktop market. Intel’s under the table bullying has left an incredible gap between the two and non of those financial fines levied on intel will decrease the gap. AMD will take a long time to catch up and I hope they do. I don’t want to pay astronomical prices for just a CPU let alone the rest of the components.

  99. Idiot, they are talking about zen being 40% IPC over excavator which is the refresh of steamroller and steam roller is faster than bulldozer in fact not a single bulldozer has be sold in 2 years the last bulldozer was the FX8150

    theFX 9090 is the last steamroller that’s is above haswell’s i5 by 50 points ! and only 1000 IPC points behind broadwell i7’s, most people quoted what i said last year but that was unrelated to zen.

    Excavator isn’t even out yet and people already jump the gun.

    But we didn’t have all the info also Zen has broadwell CPU code in it

    far out man, is this what Intel shills hope for?
    Lmao at intel shills

  100. BAHAHAHAHAH YOU ACTUALLY CATER YOUR IDENTITY TO A BRAND NAME. You are such a loser.

  101. You’re getting yourself tangled in confusion as well.

    The last Bulldozer CPU was the FX-4130, released on August 27, 2012. The FX-8150 was released in October of 2011, and remains the fastest Bulldozer CPU on the market (and very poor at best).

    Piledriver was the Bulldozer replacement. This architecture brought the likes of the FX-6300, FX-8350 and the FX-9590. The last Piledriver FX processors to be released, were on September 2, 2014 — FX-8320e, FX-8370 and FX-8370e. The performance increase was noticeable, and Piledriver remains a decent option today. Piledriver was also used in Trinity and Richland APUs, spanning 2012 to 2013.

    Steamroller replaced Piledriver in January 2014, and this is where performance really shined through. No true FX models were released under this architecture (only a rebranded Athlon X4), and it was used for Kaveri and Godavari APUs. Steamroller was notable for bringing GCN 1.1, HSA and hUMA to APUs, while increasing IPC by around 17%, and improving thermal management. The most popular models are the A10-7850K, A10-7870K and as of this month, the A10-7890K. The popular Athlon X4 models, 860K, 870K and as of this month, 880K are also good choices for an entry-level gaming computer.

    Excavator was released in the summer of 2015 with Carrizo APUs. Initially released only in the form of laptop CPUs due to a significantly improved lithography, Carrizo eventually found its way into desktop processors by the start of 2016. At this current time, only two Carrizo CPUs exist for desktops, and they are both Athlon X4 SKUs. If you’re after absolute performance, Kaveri and Godavari are where you’ll still want to go, but the improved lithography and silicon of Carrizo means that thermal management is much, much better compared to the previous iterations. This means that Excavator can outperform Steamroller when the TDP is within the 12–35 W range.

    Bristol Ridge is the codename for upcoming desktop and laptop SKUs based on the Excavator architecture. There are likely to be a few minor improvements to further squeeze as much performance out of the silicon as possible (in order to make it beneficial over Steamroller), but for the most part, we’ll be looking at clock bumps of Carrizo, and rather significant clock bumps due to the way Bristol Ridge is being marketed.

    With Carrizo, there was one TDP for all models; 15 watts, with configurable TDP available for either 12 watts or 35 watts. While good from an ideology standpoint, in practice it killed Carrizo performance in laptops available off the shelves. Why? Because vendors were rather cheaply reusing the same motherboards for both Carrizo-L and Carrizo processors. What does this mean? Well, Carrizo-L is an ultra-low-power processor, based on the Puma+ architecture, intended for tablets and very low-power laptops. In addition to this, Puma+ also only supports single-channel DDR3 memory, absolutely axing Carrizo’s integrated graphics potential by more than half.

    So, to fix this, AMD has remodeled the way Bristol Ridge is to be marketed for laptops. We have high-performance models with the 25–45 W TDP range, and low-power models with the 12–15 W TDP range. This is exactly why clock frequencies have been bumped by up to 1.00 GHz on the processor side, and up to 100 MHz on the graphics side. Furthermore, all models support DDR3-2133 and DDR4-2400. This method is definitely how it should have been done originally, to bypass issues with OEMs.

    From the information I have thus far, Bristol Ridge appears to come with integrated graphics with the same configuration as Kaveri, Godavari and Carrizo — 512 GCN shaders, 32 TMUs and 8 ROPs. Zen is expected to raise that to 768 GCN shaders, 48 TMUs and 12 ROPs, alongside embedded HBM. Whether that’s 1 GB or 2 GB, is unknown at this point. On the processor side, Zen is expected to be a substantial improvement over Excavator, offering 40% instructions per clock cycle improvement, as well as simultaneous multithreading (what Intel markets as Hyper-Threading), so it’s more than likely that a quad-core APU from Zen (Raven Ridge) will now reach Ivy Bridge or Haswell Core i7 levels of performance. I have read sources that indicate performance is able to top Broadwell, but not Skylake, and that’s not necessary for it to sell anyway.

  102. you do no that HMB was developed by AMD and that we have the whole story of another company borrowing technology off AMD all over again as with the CPU technology.

  103. have you seen the minuscule performance boosts in Intels architectures??

  104. its literally a 4 to 5 dollar difference on your power bill guys i mean seriously i never noticed any more then that when i upgraded from a 8150 to a 9590

  105. Pricing from Amazon UK as of April 7, 2016:

    FX-8350 = £136.49
    FX-8370 = £173.99
    FX-9590 = £232.81
    i7-4790K = £280.99
    i7-6700K = £289.95

    Assuming the computer is on 24/7 (this is just to power the processor):

    i7-4790K @ 88 W = £119.64 per year
    i7-6700K @ 91 W = £123.72 per year
    FX-8350 @ 125 W = £169.94 per year
    FX-8370 @ 125 W = £169.94 per year
    FX-9590 @ 220 W = £299.10 per year

    FX-8350 over i7-6700K:
    — £153.46 saved on CPU costs.
    — £46.22 more spent on electricity costs.
    — Total spent in one year is £306.43.
    — You’ll have saved £107.24 over the year.

    FX-8370 over i7-6700K:
    — £115.96 saved on CPU costs.
    — £46.22 more spent on electricity costs.
    — Total spent in one year is £343.94.
    — You’ll have saved £69.74 over the year.

    i7-4790K over FX-8370:
    — £107.00 more spent on CPU costs.
    — £50.30 saved on electricity costs.
    — Total spent in one year is £400.63.
    — You’ll have spent £56.70 more over the year.

    i7-6700K over FX-9590:
    — £57.14 more spent on CPU costs.
    — £175.38 saved on electricity costs.
    — Total spent in one year is £413.67.
    — You’ll have saved £118.24 over the year.

    FX-9590 over i7-6700K:
    — £57.14 saved on CPU costs.
    — £175.38 more spent on electricity costs.
    — Total spent in one year is £531.91.
    — You’ll have spent £118.24 more over the year.

    Now, of course, they are all very good performers, and if your neuron capacity is greater than your wallet, you’ll easily get three years out of any of these processors, so let’s do the math to cover the costs over three years.

    Assuming you run these chips 24/7, non-stop, for three years (in other words, an absolute worst case scenario!):

    FX-8350 = £646.31
    FX-8370 = £683.81
    i7-4790K = £639.91
    i7-6700K = £661.11
    FX-9590 = £1,130.11

    Over the course of the platform’s average lifecycle of three years, you’ll be spending 71% more money to keep the FX-9590 going, when compared to the i7-6700K. Suddenly, it doesn’t feel so cheap, or that you’re getting 75% of the performance for 50% of the price. This even applies to the FX-8370, but the FX-8350 shows better value than the i7-6700K (although narrowly losing to the previous Haswell chip).

    If you’re like me, and you’ll be wanting to keep your platform going for longer than three years, you’ll simply just be increasing the savings with an Intel build.

    What I will mention though, is that Amazon prices fluctuate all the time. Prices for these chips will be different no matter where you live, and the time of the year that you choose to buy. The cost for electricity per kW/h will also change depending on your location, and time of day (although I left the calculations at a flat rate to keep it legible).

    Additionally, I don’t want this to come off as me saying that AMD’s products are bad. As I said, all of these chips, regardless of where Piledriver sits against Haswell or Skylake, are powerful and sufficient enough for even the most demanding of tasks that a consumer will throw at it. The difference will simply be that one chip completes its tasks before the other. It will definitely be interesting to revisit this calculation once Zen arrives.

    For some people, the additional £43.90 per year to run an FX-8370 might not be an issue, and if they pay their electricity in many smaller chunks (such as monthly), this difference is unlikely to affect their wallet too much. However, the FX-9590 is a completely different story. I just can’t recommend this chip, unless you absolutely want the best Piledriver chip on the market, regardless of running costs. For those with AM3+ systems, this might seem more logical than buying a new computer, but I would honestly recommend just going for an FX-8320, FX-8350 or FX-8370, and trying your luck with an overclock. Now, if you are going to be doing this, you might find that your 8000 series chip may be less efficient than the 9000 series chips at the same clock speeds. Once again, it’s all about the binning process. Those binned specifically for the FX-9590 SKU will typically use less power than an FX-8370, overclocked to the FX-9590’s frequencies.

    A final word for this comparison is that it obviously doesn’t include the costs of motherboards or system memory. This is purely a processor comparison.

    I should probably create some kind of online tool that will allow you to compare running costs of processors. If I get the time to do it, I’ll edit it in below.

  106. You mean amd and hynix. You remember, the memory company…

  107. I am looking forward to seeing what Zen can do, but all this hype brings me back to Bulldozer’s launch and all the hype that came before. I hope it is competitive because we all know weather we want to admit it or not that the bulldozer was not. We really need some competition to help drive performance development in the processor segment again. If they are right about the improvements and it is at a good price point, and can really compete with Intel in the high end I would buy one but, I don’t like how there are no solid performance numbers released yet.