AMD's newest processor, the AMD Zen, has had its architecture and specs leaked, showing that it has low idle power.
According to PC Games N, early versions of the AMD Zen chip are circulated around different testers, regardless of the fact that the newest processor architecture from AMD is considered to be one of the most anticipated amongst tech-enthusiasts. Regardless, even with these early engineering samples not being the complete representation of the final product, it still gives the testers a taste of what the processor will be once it gets released by the end of this year.
In the same article, it reports that there are four variants of the Zen CPU architecture currently being tested. However, only half of its numbers are of any interest to most tech-enthusiasts. These chips are considered to be used exclusively for servers, despite the fact that these have impressive headline numbers of 24 and 32 cores. Additionally, the aforementioned chip can only be used on other platforms but not on a PC.
As for the other two engineering samples, these have pretty low clockspeeds, running at 2.8GHz and 3.2GHz when boosted. However, a lot of tech-enthusiasts are not yet concerned, as the specs are still not final after all. It is possible that the current clockspeed keeps the two processors honest with fairly good TDP levels. However, the idle performance of the Zen chip is indeed interesting.
It has an idle clockspeed of 550MHz, which delivers a low power state of 2.5W and 5W for the quad- and octa-core CPUs. This is considered to be a huge boost in saving power when idle, since the last CPU architecture made by AMD consumes 30W in its idle state. Currently, the Core i7-6700K boasts 3.5W idle power consumption, but it's possible that the Zen quad-core chip will trump it, should it maintain this performance in its final release.
