AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) has finally lifted the veil off its high-performance processors using the Zen microarchitecture. Many PC hardware enthusiasts have been looking forward to this date.
The special event happened in San Francisco, where Dr. Lisa Su, president and CEO of AMD, demonstrated a Summit Ridge CPU, a consumer desktop processor that features the company's Zen core. The processor is 8-core and16-thread and was pitted against a similarly configured Intel Broadwell-E processor, the official announcement said.
AMD also demonstrated one of its Zen-based server processors, named Naples, which is 32-core and 64-thread, running the Windows Server operating system.
Su said, "The performance and efficiency of our 'Zen' core showcases AMD at its best. Over the last four years we have made significant investments to develop a high-performance, multi-generation CPU roadmap that will power leadership products. Customer excitement for 'Zen' continues to grow as we make significant progress towards the launch of new products that will span from the datacenter to high-end PCs."
The Zen architecture is a newly designed microarchitecture and is not a re-release of the previous architecture, the Bulldozer design. It uses the newer 14nm FinFET manufacturing process and provides an increases in its efficiency while still consuming a little less power against its predecessor.
Mark Papermaster, senior vice president and chief technology officer at AMD, mentioned that the new microarchitecture will be able to provide a 40 percent increase in instructions per clock performance. The new AMD chips will also be providing dedicated PCIe lanes.
WCCFTech added that the next-generation AMD chips will be featuring two threads per core, a large L2 cache, an 8MB L3 cache (shared), a Micro-op Cache and two AES units for security.
The new processors will be utilizing AM4 socket, which is also compatible with the 7th generation AMD A-Series desktop processor, and will be shipping to OEMs anytime this year.
