AMD unexpectedly (page 4) released details about its upcoming Zen CPU microarchitecture:
AMD hosted an offsite invitation-only briefing during IDF to unveil the company's new Zen processor core microarchitecture, which will initially come to market in its Summit Ridge desktop CPUs. [...] AMD's original goal was to increase Zen's IPC (Instructions Per Cycle) performance by 40 percent compared to the previous-generation Excavator core. According to the company, it achieved its goals. AMD also noted that the company focused on providing power efficiency gains in tandem with the performance improvements, which is the key attribute that will allow the Zen cores to scale to address a broad swath of market segments. The Summit Ridge processors on display featured 8 cores and 16 threads.
[...] Zen uses the same 14nm GlobalFoundries FinFET process that it employs on its Polaris GPUs. The process provides a nice improvement over the 28nm process used with the Excavator and Steamroller microarchitectures. Zen CPUs will drop into the AM4 chipset that debuted with the Bristol and Stony Ridge products. The AM4 chipset supports DDR4, PCIe 3.0, Next-Gen I/O, USB 3.1 Gen 2, NVMe and SATA Express. AMD added SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading), a new cache hierarchy and increased branch prediction capabilities to the Zen core to attain its ambitious IPC goals.
The company added a micro-op cache, which helps with better instruction predictions, to increase ILP (Instruction Level Parallelism). AMD also added a wider execution width and improved instruction scheduling to boost ILP (and thus IPC). The company claims the optimizations provide 75 percent more scheduling capacity and a 50 percent increase in instruction width over its previous-generation processors.
Zen will be available "in volume" in 2017. Also on display was a 32 core/64 thread "Naples" server CPU.
(Score: 3, Funny) by RamiK on Thursday August 18 2016, @11:46PM
You get a mutex; And you get a mutex; And I get a mutex... Mutexes! For everyone! WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
compiling...
(Score: 4, Funny) by davester666 on Friday August 19 2016, @05:50AM
geez dude. take a zen pill.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday August 19 2016, @08:42PM
Does it come with a mutex? :)
compiling...
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday August 19 2016, @01:41AM
Glad to see some more details. Not sure about the "drop into the AM4 chipset" part though. Makes it sound everyone has an AM4 board already or something. Newegg doesn't even sell them yet. I am very excited though! The article said that AMD will sell the processors to Dell and other computer companies first before the "hobby" market. Boooo. Too excited to wait another 6-9 months.
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(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Friday August 19 2016, @01:47AM
If they want to keep up with intel, they need to include avx-512, or bolt a massive GPU that shares a memory path with the CPU rather than really slow PCIE or Hypertransport.
Just saying...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 19 2016, @03:44AM
Even Skylake desktop chips have no AVX-512 support.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @03:27AM
So, uhhhh, why is it called zen?
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Friday August 19 2016, @03:31AM
It's the state of mind they needed to lead their company out of the gutter, rather than panic.
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(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday August 19 2016, @03:38AM
This sounds like it would be perfect for a Gentoo box. AMD CPUs have almost always done better on Linux than windows (feel free to speculate as to why), and I suspect that a system compiled from the ground up for Zen will be amazingly potent.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday August 19 2016, @06:04AM
Does it rhyme with WinTel compiler?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday August 19 2016, @04:47PM
And "lintel defiler," yes.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday August 19 2016, @04:06AM
More details on the 32 core server chip:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10581/early-amd-zen-server-cpu-and-motherboard-details-codename-naples-32cores-dual-socket-platforms-q2-2017 [anandtech.com]
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Chromium_One on Friday August 19 2016, @08:39AM
Assuming performance as presented in the tech demo (roughly on par clock for clock with 6th gen i7) holds for most workloads ...
Assuming clock speeds scale up decently by release date ...
Assuming the move to 14nm fab process closes the watt/flop gap that currently exists ...
Assuming they can get the parts out at a good price point ...
Whole 'lot of assumptions there, but I can dream of Intel having some competition again. Would be nice to see some kind of downward pressure on desktop CPU prices.
When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @12:29PM
I hope you are right.