AMD has finally raised curtains on its early version of silicon for AMD's long-awaited Zen processor .The new processor with architecture promising super-low idle power is scheduled to hit markets before the end of the year.
Early versions of AMD Zen chips have already been circulated to a wide array of testers. These engineering specimens however are not fully symbolic of the chips that will be heading customer's way before year's end.
The highly anticipated new processor architecture has come forward as a result of many years of groundwork, and if things unwind according to plan, then AMD Zen should manage to take to take dominance in the long fought battle of desktop PC markets , that has been ruled by Intel's Core i line-up of desktop processors, for over the last half decade now. Customers who purchased AMD hardware in the past , and then felt left out are also looking forward to Zen for salvation. "Zen is alive, Zen is on track and we are extraordinarily excited." Said Lisa Su AMD CEO at the company's Computex press conference.
AMD has also started a sales campaign which might be the most successful since Henri Richard's famous campaign that took over more than 50% market share from Intel in in 4P and 8P enterprise markets
There are reportedly four different versions of the Zen CPU architecture at the moment. Two of them are full-on server style chips and the other two are desktop samples, quad-core, eight thread and eight-core, sixteen thread versions. With their foray in high-end desktop, workstation and server market Zen could be the Messiah the world of PC desperately awaits.
In terms of their cache configuration the quad-core chip is squaring 2MB of L2 and 8MB of L3 cache, while the octo-core Zen clouting a good 4MB and 16MB of L2 and L3 cache respectively. The thermal design point (TDP) of the two chips also looks satisfying, being reported as 95W for the octo-core and 65W for the quad-core.
