AMD IS BACK! AMD’s Zen CPU Core Coming in 2016!

get ready for processor TDP of 500W, AMD is known to use excessive power to boost performance

"Zen will be a 14nm product, and the 8 core CPUs will allegedly have a 95W TDP. So that's even less than Haswell-E, it's not like AMD is going crazy with power consumption again to try and be competitive."

So an AMD CPU to be released sometime in 2016 will have the single-threaded performance of an Intel processor released in 2013, and finally include SMT technology that Intel has been using since 2002.

Brilliant.

Hopefully the hype is as good as the specs, otherwise I don't see the need to be hopping brands beside maybe a change in color scheme.

Financials wrote: ↑"Zen will be a 14nm product, and the 8 core CPUs will allegedly have a 95W TDP. So that's even less than Haswell-E, it's not like AMD is going crazy with power consumption again to try and be competitive."

hahahahahahaha

divx wrote: ↑hahahahahahaha

ill believe it when i see it too heh, but i mean it was released info so we shall see how it goes.

if they do something ***** and flop again with stupid power hungry heat boxes i doubt they survive long... stock needs a kick.

truthfully, i just hope this lowers intel pricing if they can get competitive at the higher end. basically outside of budget cpus everyone is at the mercy of intel.

tritium4ever wrote: ↑So an AMD CPU to be released sometime in 2016 will have the single-threaded performance of an Intel processor released in 2013, and finally include SMT technology that Intel has been using since 2002.

Brilliant.

This is a highly misleading post. Intel themselves launched a CPU in 2015 (Broadwell) that's no faster than what they released in 2013, so it's not as if Intel's own performance is still continuously soaring into the stratosphere. Clock for clock, Broadwell might be just 15-20% faster than Sandy Bridge, and that was from January 2011. I think it's safe to say that Intel has hit a performance wall ever since Sandy Bridge, partially because Sandy Bridge's performance was so far ahead of its time. It was Core 2 all over again.

There's a reason why people still use Sandy Bridge as the baseline performance metric today. Every Intel CPU launch after Sandy Bridge has been disappointing. That's not to say they were bad products, just that the performance gain over Sandy Bridge has been minimal. People always hoped for the next big thing, but all we got were single digit increases (if any). People are now hoping for Skylake to be the next big thing - I wouldn't count on it. It'll most likely be 5-10% faster than Haswell at best.

I hope this helps

Misleading how? If Zen has the single-threaded performance of Haswell, AMD is accomplishing in 2016 what Intel did in 2013. Intel "hitting a wall after Sandy Bridge" doesn't change this fact.

Over the last several years AMD has had a habit of over-promising and under-delivering. We'll see next year if Zen can change that.

tritium4ever wrote: ↑Misleading how? If Zen has the single-threaded performance of Haswell, AMD is accomplishing in 2016 what Intel did in 2013. Intel "hitting a wall after Sandy Bridge" doesn't change this fact.

Over the last several years AMD has had a habit of over-promising and under-delivering. We'll see next year if Zen can change that.

Are they hitting a wall or purposely taking their time because they have no competition?

george__ wrote: ↑Are they hitting a wall or purposely taking their time because they have no competition?

Seems to me they're focusing more on low TDP than raw performance. Mobile devices with long battery life appear to be the future, rather than high-powered desktops. Between the Core M and the Atom tablet CPUs, I'd guess Intel is resting on their laurels for desktop CPUs and looking to take over the mobile market.

JAC wrote: ↑Seems to me they're focusing more on low TDP than raw performance. Mobile devices with long battery life appear to be the future, rather than high-powered desktops. Between the Core M and the Atom tablet CPUs, I'd guess Intel is resting on their laurels for desktop CPUs and looking to take over the mobile market.

Not just low TDP, but low idle power. They've made huge improvements in idle power since Sandy Bridge despite the TDP and max performance not changing all that much. A 4770K drops to below 10W at idle, while a 2600K could only manage 15-20W. That's a massive difference.

Intel probably has contingency plans years ago for this eventual scenario. They knew amd would catch up eventually. This is good news. Finally a bit of competition from amd.

We would all be on 6-8 cores for a medium end machine if amd didn't lag so badly behind intel for half a decade.

tritium4ever wrote: ↑Misleading how? If Zen has the single-threaded performance of Haswell, AMD is accomplishing in 2016 what Intel did in 2013. Intel "hitting a wall after Sandy Bridge" doesn't change this fact.

Over the last several years AMD has had a habit of over-promising and under-delivering. We'll see next year if Zen can change that.

Misleading in the sense that your post implied AMD's new CPU will deliver subpar performance for today's standards because it only matches that of a 3-year-old Intel product, when in fact that same 3-year-old product is still par for today.

...unless this is not what you meant to say.

I'm not holding my breath. There was some serious design flaws in the Bulldozer arch IMHO.

I remember reading the architecture specification preview on a few review sites and I was like man this arch is going to underwhelm, and I was right. Funny at the time I had a Core 2 Quad and was mulling over upgrading and after that just decided to go to an i7.

However, I do hope to see a reasonably competitive CPU from AMD as that may get Intel to jump start looking at ways to improve CPU performance because as I see it, it has spent the last few years focusing on the iGPU's on their CPUs.

If this is another disappointment like every CPU AMD has released post 2006, AMD should just go back to it roots and make copies of intel chips transistor for transistor.

So this puts AMD a few years behind Intel which themselves are behind the 8 ball due to lack of presence in the mobile space.

toalan wrote: ↑If this is another disappointment like every CPU AMD has released post 2006, AMD should just go back to it roots and make copies of intel chips transistor for transistor.

i don't believe amd has ever done that

I'm not seeing anything particularly impressive, but we will need to wait for price, benchmarks, etc.