AMD provides a first glance at Zen Summit Ridge performance

[HEXUS]

Demonstrates that it beats a comparable recent Intel i7 chip in multi-threaded tasks.

Read more.

[mattburnzy]

I feel like AMD thinks we get excited with these vague tidbits.....

[scaryjim]

I feel like AMD thinks we get excited with these vague tidbits.....

They're not meant for us, they're meant for investors, and they're not meant to excite, they're meant to reassure. If you're sunk money into AMD at any point over the last few years you're probably beginning to wonder where the return on investment is going to come from. This presentation was clearly aimed at convincing investors that AMD's tech roadmap is primed to return them to healthy profitability. Given AMDs last few years, a high end desktop processor that competes with Intel's extreme platform is a welcome claim - only question now is whether AMD can deliver.

[shaithis]

Oh, Zen, I'd almost forgot about these.....

[The Hand]

Desktop availability in volume is expected to be in the first quarter of 2017 but there might be some limited volumes of Zen chips shipped before New Year.

Hmm, the launch window keeps slipping, though I can't imagine AMD daring to delay it much more. APUs out in Q2 perhaps? Though these too could be delayed to let the Zen CPUs settle in sales wise.

[watercooled]

I find a couple of points about this quite reassuring; first they have now explicitly said the 40% IPC improvement is vs Excavator, I'm not sure if they have before and there are still people claiming it was vs Piledriver.

Second, they seem to have compared it pretty fairly to an equivalent Intel chip - when I read the brief I half expected them to be comparing to a 4C8T i7 - to see it compared in a multithreaded application to a workstation class Intel processor with an identical number of cores is a relief.

Of course we still don't know final clocks or measured power consumption but the graph does at least state energy per cycle is on par with Excavator, which is quite an efficient core. And 3GHz gives us at least a minimum of what to expect; the base frequency of the 8 core Broadwell-E i7 is only 200MHz higher.

[mattburnzy]

I feel like AMD thinks we get excited with these vague tidbits.....

They're not meant for us, they're meant for investors, and they're not meant to excite, they're meant to reassure. If you're sunk money into AMD at any point over the last few years you're probably beginning to wonder where the return on investment is going to come from. This presentation was clearly aimed at convincing investors that AMD's tech roadmap is primed to return them to healthy profitability. Given AMDs last few years, a high end desktop processor that competes with Intel's extreme platform is a welcome claim - only question now is whether AMD can deliver.

So vague tidbits are meant to reassure investors? Thats not what i would want the company that I've been investing my money to do. Also I found more of a breakdown on other sites so I guess there was more spilled in San Fran then posted here.

[watercooled]

So vague tidbits are meant to reassure investors? Thats not what i would want the company that I've been investing my money to do. Also I found more of a breakdown on other sites so I guess there was more spilled in San Fran then posted here.

What more were you honestly expecting? You're not going to get tons of details of final products months before release to give their competitors the advantage. I'm sort of surprised we're even seeing this much, it's more than we get for most Intel releases, or even past AMD ones.

[scaryjim]

So vague tidbits are meant to reassure investors? ...

As far as the technical information that Hexus would report goes, yes. I'm sure the event included other information that wouldn't interest "us" but was equally reassuring to investors.

Incidentally, the press release confirms that Bristol Ridge will be released to desktop this year, initially in OEM systems. That kind of makes sense - OEMs will be happier to tool motherboard designs for APUs then reuse them for HEDT systems when Zen gets released. The big question is whether Bristol Ridge will launch into the channel at the same time, or whether it'll have to wait until Zen CPUs come out to persuade motherboard manufacturers to get boards into the channel at the same time...

[Corky34]

TBH I wish AMD were in a position to let the product speak for itself, i get what scaryjim said about this being intended to reassure investors, i just wish that wasn't necessary as so far these reassurances always seem oversell things leaving me personally (not an investor) disappointed when the products finally ships.

[kalniel]

Well I am excited. Same or better performance as Broadwell-E at same core/thread and clockspeed. That's not something to be ignored given the premium Intel charge for Broadwell-E or how long it's expected to remain in the market.

[watercooled]

Oh wow I didn't realise how much they'd released - just found a couple more slides over at Ars with core block diagrams detailing core width, features, etc. It looks to have a uOp cache like Intel (although AMD are just calling it an op cache but I assume it's the same given it's after the decoder), 4 ALU ports like Haswell/Skylake, although Intel seem to have a couple extra load/store/address ports. They're only high level details which is understandable so we don't know lower-level capabilities but it does look like the foundations of what you'd call a modern big core (well, big in x86 terms anyway).

Edit: It looks like it matches the 2 load + 1 store per cycle of Haswell too, and presumably Skylake but I can't seem to find it.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AT article on the slides:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10578/...archy-revealed

[watercooled]

Only just started reading and realised that the separate Int and FP schedulers, and each having their own ports means it's technically a wider machine than Skylake! I suppose that's more relevant to mixed workloads and especially those that will make use of the SMT but it's very interesting nonetheless. That separation almost resembles the Bulldozer CMT lineage.

OK I'll stop post spamming and read it now.

[mtyson]

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

First AM4 and server socket motherboards for Zen spotted:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10581/...tforms-q2-2017

Looks like even the server CPUs have an integrated Southbridge.