Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) recently had success in the graphics card market with its release of the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X. However, the same cannot be said for its notebook, desktop, and server processors. Will AMD's upcoming Zen processors be able to mitigate this?
For the last two years, AMD has released nothing but Accelerated Processing Units (APU), which is the company's cost-effective desktop offering that falls within the $300 to $500 range. While the APU offer much better graphics processing performance than Intel's 4600 HD on several game titles such as "Bioshock Infinite," "Battlefield 4," "Thief", and many others, the latter offers a better overall compute capacity. In addition, both integrated chipsets can get beaten by a $75 discrete graphics card and a discrete graphics card on Intel systems will produce more frames per second over an APU fitted with the same card. Thus, the APUs end up getting brushed aside.
The company's Vishera FX series has not really taken off as well. Although it performs just as good as some of the fourth generation i5 and i7 processors that cost more than $200, most still opt for Intel's Maxwell-based chips just because they are faster and consume less power. In fact, on overclocked settings, for people who indulge in games for an average of three hours per day, Intel's processors will make up for the price disparity within three years due to power consumption.
This is in accordance with Tek Syndicate's review of an overclocked FX 8350 and an overclocked i5-3570k showing that the 8350 consumes 123 watts more than the 3570k on overclocked settings. Then again, one can argue about the time value of money; money you can spend now is worth more than what you can spend tomorrow.
However, the FX series should not be counted out so easily. At the end of July, Windows 10 with DirectX 12 will be released. Know that DirectX 11 cannot fully utilize multi-core processors and with the higher-end FX series running on six to eight cores, it is safe to assume that the software limits the hardware's performance. This is all speculation for now but most expect that both Intel's multithreaded Maxell chips and AMD's FX series processors to perform better with DirectX 12. Whether Intel still outperforms AMD is a question that will have an answer in a couple of weeks. The real benchmarks will come once most software gets ported to DX12 from DX11.
If AMD's processor technology proves to be superior, it may help the fabless chip outfit improve its market share for several CPU categories and pave the way for its yet to be released Zen processors.
According to an article by Roger Kay of Forbes, research firms IDC and Mercury report that Intel had over 98 percent market share in the server processor market in the third quarter of 2014. Meanwhile, they marked Intel's market share at 90 to 93% in notebooks and 82 to 83 percent in desktops. "At this point, Intel's revenue is an order of magnitude larger than AMD's, and its market cap is nearly two orders of magnitude greater," Kay concluded.
AMD's bet to regain some footing in the desktop and server processor market is the Zen CPU, which is due for release next year. It will use Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT), which somewhat resembles Intel's Hyperthreading system. SMT will boost the performance by 40 percent in instructions per clock (IPC). The new CPU will also incorporate a "high-bandwidth, low latency cache system," which sounds similar to the recently released High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) that breathe a new life into AMD graphics cards. The said processors will run on an AM4 socket, which supports DDR4.
The company has also announced that Zen's release next year is meant for the high-end desktop CPU market and that the APUs and trimmed down versions of the CPU will follow, most likely in 2017. However, will it be too late by then?
In one of his more recent videos, Linus Sebastian of LinusTechTips was questioned on why he seems to only review Intel products as of late and here is what he had to say, "When AMD releases exciting new products we're on them. We even borrowed an R9 295X2 when that launched and they didn't send us one. The issue is that AMD hasn't really released a new enthusiast grade CPU in years. How am I supposed to get excited about making a video about a three- to four-year old product? When AMD releases Zen and it kicks a** (let's hope) we will cover it."
