Aug 21, 2016 at 3:29 AM
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Source: AMD shows its Zen CPU can compete with Intel’s bes
AMD on Thursday finally unveiled its new Zen microarchitecture, with a pair of CPUs that could put the company back into the fight with Intel’s best.
AMD said its Summit Ridge CPU, aimed at high-performance desktops, will pack 8 cores and feature simultaneous multi-threading technology to give it 16 threads of processing power. Summit Ridge is targeted for Q1 2017, though a trickle of chips could appear sooner. A second chip for servers, code-named Naples, will feature an astounding 32 cores with SMT, giving it 64 threads per CPU. SMT is similar to Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology, which splits a single core into two virtual cores for more performance.
To prove that Zen has the right stuff, AMD officials on Wednesday night demonstrated before a crowd of reporters and analysts that an 8-core Zen could run just as fast as Intel’s newest 8-core consumer Core i7 chip.
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The demonstration used the multi-threaded Blender rendering application on two similarly configured PCs. One featured an engineering sample Summit Ridge chip, while the other featured a new Intel Broadwell-E Core i7-6900K CPU. While the Core i7-6900K can run up to 4GHz on some workloads, AMD conducted the test with both CPUs locked at 3GHz.
This methodology may seem unorthodox to some, but matching the chips clock-for-clock helps reveal their efficiencies. Conducting the test this way also helps AMD protect the final shipping clock speeds of the chips. In the demo, which was performed just once, the Zen finished a nose ahead of the Broadwell-E Core i7-6900K chip.
It’s just a single test on an unreleased CPU, and under the control of AMD. Still, the significance of the performance feat quells any fears that Zen would be the all-too-familiar “too little, too late” story from a company that has eaten Intel’s dust.
The demonstration exceeded the crowd’s expectations. “This is the most exciting AMD (CPU) launch in a decade,” said Kevin Krewell, principal analyst with Tirias Research, who attended the event. “They really have hit the mark on this.”
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AMD officials also lifted the curtain on Zen's completely new microarchitecture. Gone are the shared, clustered multi-thread cores of the previous Bulldozer and Piledriver designs—Zen’s cores are stand-alone cores with SMT. The chip is being fabbed by spin-off company Global Foundries on a 14nm process, using FinFet technology.
Source: AMD shows its Zen CPU can compete with Intel’s bes
. Perhaps they intend to show that the Zen withstands even with poor airflow in the cabinet /s