Is AMD back on track with the upcoming Zen CPU?

[DemonHighwayman]

They should sell to Samsung and let Samsung fight it out with Intel, if they're intelligent. JMO

If they sell to another company the new owner is not allowed to produce x86 chips, so they would not be competing with intel and intel would almost have the market to themselves, become even more lazy, prices would go up, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria !

Basically AMD, competitive chips or not are single handedly keeping prices from going through the roof, if they can't make a competitive product we're doomed, if they sell we're doomed.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

They seem to be claiming 40% over excavator, not piledriver. I honestly believe that if they laid out a recent core on the old 32nm process they wouldn't be far off the i7 already. 28nm sucks for cpus.

That would mean around 50% to 55% over Piledriver.

[UnixNerd]

If this is going to be a genuinely competitive CPU vs the modern Core-Ix's then to be honest that's a win no matter who you buy your CPUs from. Normally AMD come in with a lower price point and if as someone speculated earlier Intel are holding back performance then we'll see a performance hike from them and prices squeezed because of it which all leads to cheaper higher performance CPU for the consumer. i.e Us. And higher priced super CPUs for the power users. They are happy we are happy.
What's not to like?

[DanceswithUnix]

If they sell to another company the new owner is not allowed to produce x86 chips, so they would not be competing with intel and intel would almost have the market to themselves, become even more lazy, prices would go up, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria !

Basically AMD, competitive chips or not are single handedly keeping prices from going through the roof, if they can't make a competitive product we're doomed, if they sell we're doomed.

If Samsung bought AMD it would be for the graphics and for K12, they largely pulled out of the PC market some time back.

That would mean around 50% to 55% over Piledriver.

It would, which seems rather more than likely to happen.

But really they just need to up the minimum frame rate in key games to be back in the consumer game. Intel can always roll out something like this:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9193/t...8800-v3-review

to get the top x86 performance crown. That article misses the point utterly in terms of Power servers: people buy IBM because they cannot afford one single blue-screen style system crash and are happy to pay for something rock solid backed by awesome support, but it shows that Intel can do muscle platforms if needed.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

TBH,a 40% to 50% improvement in the ST IPC would put Zen at IB or Haswell levels of IPC. If they get to that level though,another factor will be clockspeeds too.
It will be interesting to see how well AMD will implement SMT.

[shaithis]

Back on track?

It's vaporware.....We need to wait another 1-2 years to see the product....ergo how can anyone make a conclusion based on that?

[DanceswithUnix]

TBH,a 40% to 50% improvement in the ST IPC would put Zen at IB or Haswell levels of IPC. If they get to that level though,another factor will be clockspeeds too.
It will be interesting to see how well AMD will implement SMT.

But the FM2 platform has been holding the existing cores back so badly we don't reall havfe a baseline. I mean: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/697?vs=1200

7850 vs 8350, pretty one sided the new chip loses thanks to all that silicon being wasted on GPU that we don't want.

Back on track?

It's vaporware.....We need to wait another 1-2 years to see the product....ergo how can anyone make a conclusion based on that?

Because unless you find "Performance at 15W" a thrill, which I suspect vanishingly few of us do, the CPU market is pretty dull these days so idle speculation is the most fun you can have. I for one am not drawing any hard conclusions, but guessing is fun. In reality, I think it all comes down to how good 14nm is.

[Gunbuster]

Because unless you find "Performance at 15W" a thrill, which I suspect vanishingly few of us do, the CPU market is pretty dull these days so idle speculation is the most fun you can have. I for one am not drawing any hard conclusions, but guessing is fun. In reality, I think it all comes down to how good 14nm is.

I agree, I really hope AMD comes back even at the level it is in the graphics market (
25-30%).

That said everything is duller now. Graphics cards are really not that revolutionary on features and AAA games look pretty similar in thinking to launch 360 titles.

p.s. to the kids, get off my lawn!

[shaithis]

But the FM2 platform has been holding the existing cores back so badly we don't reall havfe a baseline. I mean: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/697?vs=1200

7850 vs 8350, pretty one sided the new chip loses thanks to all that silicon being wasted on GPU that we don't want.

Is it the socket holding them back though? Or is it that they do not want to put an IGP-less design together? All the current Athlons for FMx sockets are just A-Series chips with the IGP disabled (in many cases presumably because the IGPs are defective).

Does the socket really stop them spinning up a dedicated CPU?

[Divefire]

Charts and conversions like this just make me regret not jumping to a Sandybridge setup rather than piecemeal upgrades of my AM3+ system. AMD have done a fine job of squandering enthusiasts support over the years and the age old promise of "Just wait, something awesome will be here soon! You'll like it, just hold on a little longer!" is very tired.

We need AMD to be competitive but until Zen is in hand and shown to be worthwhile it's just another bid to stop people jumping to Intel.

[DanceswithUnix]

Is it the socket holding them back though? Or is it that they do not want to put an IGP-less design together? All the current Athlons for FMx sockets are just A-Series chips with the IGP disabled (in many cases presumably because the IGPs are defective).

Does the socket really stop them spinning up a dedicated CPU?

Well the socket was intended for 28nm processors and that process seems to suck for CPU use. I think the current cores are tuned for no L3 cache, so would take some engineering work to rework the memory system for something higher performance.

What might be more interesting would be a back port of the bit improvements onto the 32nm SOI technology. That is also a lot of work, so if you were doing that now I expect targetting the 22nm SOI technology that IBM use for their Power CPUs would be better.

[flufflogic]

So this would be a terrible time for me to need to do a PC upgrade, huh...

I'm hardly flush, So I was going to go for an 8350, and from the sounds of it I should utterly nix that idea because next year everything will be changing and no matter what I do I'll likely be screwed by it all next year.

Ugh. What to do...

[DanceswithUnix]

So this would be a terrible time for me to need to do a PC upgrade, huh...

I'm hardly flush, So I was going to go for an 8350, and from the sounds of it I should utterly nix that idea because next year everything will be changing and no matter what I do I'll likely be screwed by it all next year.

Ugh. What to do...

There is always something new on the horizon, so there is never a good time to upgrade. When Zen comes out it will be first iteration of that design, so do you wait for the next version?

What are you upgrading from? I went from a 955BE to an FX8350, it was a good cheap(ish) upgrade.

Edit to add: In my case, the 955BE was a nice upgrade for my son so it was 2 upgrades for the price of one. Your mileage may vary.

[scaryjim]

... next year everything will be changing and no matter what I do I'll likely be screwed by it all next year. ...

That's basically true any time you do a major upgrade/rebuild though. There's always something better coming in 12 - 18 months time. OTOH, it seems unlikely that anything utterly game-changing will be released in the next 12 months, so if your computer needs upgrading now are you really willing to struggle on with it for another 12 months? Only you can decide that

[shaithis]

So this would be a terrible time for me to need to do a PC upgrade, huh...

Depends on how you look at it......You could say it's a good time because there is nothing to imminently wait for. So your choices are limited to:

1. Wait until late 2016 (or more likely, early 2017)
2. Do a chip upgrade on your current board (if possible, sufficient and worthwhile)
3. Buy an Intel mobo/CPU (hell, even a second-hand IVB/Haswell i5/i7/Xeon setup would be near the top-end)

[EN1R0PY]

Dear AMD Santa

For Christmas I would like:
PCIe3
Quad channel DDR4 ram
Native USB3
More instructions per clock
Low latency RAM access
Infra-threading (OK I made that one up but how good would it be to use two cores of a module on one thread?)