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Along with its big debut of the new RX series of AMD graphics cards, this year's Computex was also home to the first showing of its upcoming Zen CPU architecture. The new processors are designed to bring improved efficiency and power to the table.
To throw more fuel on the fire, AMD roped in Microsoft, Dell and HP to come to the stage to talk up its latest APU release.
Zen wasn't broken down in minute detail, but we did learn a lot about about the upcoming new chip series. AMD's president and CEO, Lisa Su (pictured above) said during her address, that Zen was currently “early in the bring up,” so should be launching soon.
It will show up first on desktops platforms with the AM4 socket and then will transition over to servers, with the first Zen APUs showing up early in 2017.
We were also told that Zen will offer strong performance improvements over its predecessors and that it will be far more efficient too. However, AMD will have different ranges of processor aimed at different markets. The FX, A12 and A10 chips will offer the most performance – with the former being aimed at gamers more than anything else.
All will offer support for 4K video, even on notebook platforms. That's where the A9 chips will be most present bringing “big-core performance, premium features to everyday PCs.”
As much as AMD talked up its own hardware though, it also roped in some of its friends to give its 7th gen APUs a resounding endorsement too. Matt Perry, head of the partner program at Microsoft made an appearance, along with Josephine Tran, VP of consumer product management for notebooks at HP and Ray Vah, VP of consumer products at Dell.
All of them showed off upcoming products utilising the new 7th gen APUs hardware, as well as extolling its virtues. AMD's continued close ties with Microsoft might suggest that this sort of hardware, perhaps with an RX chip in tow, will go into the expected higher-power Xbox One Scorpio.
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KitGuru Says: It seems from AMD's Computex showing that it's got quite a bright future with both Zen and the RX series of graphics cards. Do you think it can compete with Nvidia and Intel enough to stay relevant over the next year?
Might help AMD’s Stock
I hope polaris launching on June 29th will and AM4-Zen a little later. bought 243 shares at $2.58 a little over mth ago, they shot to $4.8 now at $4.56 last trade listed, so it almost doubled which is nice, I want it to hit $10 minimum make back some $ 🙂
Yeah I think there’s more product in the pipeline like Vega 11 or 10 coming this year and will have HBM2
There is a few things I did not expect here. First, is to see small Zen (15W TDP) mentioned already. Second, is that Lisa Su seemed to imply we will see desktop Zen as a whole this year, not just HEDT (high end desktop) Zen as AMD previously suggested.
AMD recently said in an interview with Seeking Alpha that Vega is early 2017.
I just can’t wait for when AMD finally uses the multiple patents they’ve had for several years now based around technology that combines an APU (CPU&grpahics CUs) with dedicated and integrated HBM1/2 on a single interposer to create a seriously powerful APU. They also have a few patents on integrating dedicated HBM with a CPU to act has a huge, extremely fast L4 Cache…sort of like the i7-5775C on HGH. An APU with at least 4 zen cores, a descent amount of GCN 4.0 CUs, and say 2GB-4GB of HBM acting as dedicated VRAM would be pretty damn awesome, especially in a mobile application (although I believe they have one patent where the HBM can by dynamically rationed out as needed, so some to for the CUs, some for an L4 Cache for CPU work, etc) Perhaps, an APU of that power (acting more like an SoC) would be able to run a VR HMD of AAA quality by itself, making VR truly wireless and portable…but at the least, an APU like that would make some seriously powerful and kickass tablets and very thin laptops that can easily achieve 60fps @ 1080p.
Yes, Vega is the successor to Fiji and will contain HBM2, and recently Papermaster said Vega will actually reach the “ultra-enthusiast” segment, so I’m expecting some pretty impressive power from Vega. Interestingly enough, there are grumblings now that nvidia’s pascal (specifically the to be released 1080ti and Titan X successor now may NOT have HBM2…though these are rumors)
They’re going with the HEDT first cause high density servers can be 816 and they need to get margins up on CPUs… Then they will start releasing APUs and CPUs with fused graphics…
As excited as I am about Zen this article is meh. “we learners so much about zen.” Better performance and efficiency, AM4 socket, DDR4, 14nm, coming soon to a pc near you. What was new here?
They are being official and vocal about it, this can’t be classified as rumor anymore. Most folks don’t read rumors, they are clueless right up until launch, so this presentation was a way to spur up interest. Nothing more.