Wednesday, May 6th 2015
AMD "Zen" Offers a 40% IPC Increase Over "Excavator"
In its Investor Day presentation, led by CEO Lisa Su, and CTO Mark Papermaster, AMD made a slew of careful, near-term product announcements, and market strategies. One of its announcements that strike us, is the company's emphasis on getting the CPU core design right. The company talked about its "Zen" CPU core architecture, not from a technical standpoint, on how it fits into the company's near-term. It turns out that the company is betting on a massive performance increase.
AMD announced that its "Zen" CPU core, will offer a massive 40 percent increase in IPC (instructions per clock) or in other words, performance/clock, over the existing "Excavator" CPU core architecture. Zen will introduce features such as SMT (simultaneous multi-threading), a brand new low-latency cache system, and will leverage the 14 nm FinFET process. The first products based on Zen will be desktop CPUs in the 6th generation FX processor family, which will be launched in 2016. AMD plans to unify the CPU and APU into one socket, which will be called AM4 (and not the previously thought of "FM3"). You'll be able to install both CPUs (which lack integrated graphics, but feature more CPU cores); and the company's 7th generation A-series APUs (which integrate both CPU and iGPUs), on the same kind of motherboards.
AMD announced that its "Zen" CPU core, will offer a massive 40 percent increase in IPC (instructions per clock) or in other words, performance/clock, over the existing "Excavator" CPU core architecture. Zen will introduce features such as SMT (simultaneous multi-threading), a brand new low-latency cache system, and will leverage the 14 nm FinFET process. The first products based on Zen will be desktop CPUs in the 6th generation FX processor family, which will be launched in 2016. AMD plans to unify the CPU and APU into one socket, which will be called AM4 (and not the previously thought of "FM3"). You'll be able to install both CPUs (which lack integrated graphics, but feature more CPU cores); and the company's 7th generation A-series APUs (which integrate both CPU and iGPUs), on the same kind of motherboards.
49 Comments on AMD "Zen" Offers a 40% IPC Increase Over "Excavator"
Looking at AMD's cash reserves and loans, to me it seems that they'll die if Zen and the 2016 Radeons don't change their current course.
This news is far more exciting than anything Intel has done for the desktop after Sandy Bridge though. I hope they're not overestimating that 40% IPC gain over Excavator, and that it doesn't lead to much lower clock rates.
Bulldozer was a disaster. Jaguar cores have excellent performance per die area. I can't help but think the Zen cores will be beefed up Jaguar cores.
Keep in mind that Bulldozer's pipeline is over 20 something steps long and the target clocks were supposed to be in the 4.5 - 5 GHz range. Zen will bring things back to something more reasonable like 10-13 steps and thus frequency will be affected negatively and will most likely be down to a 3 - 3.5 GHz range.
If they had to under-clock the Bulldozer cores for that comparison, that further reduced their performance, because the severe cache miss-prediction problem is even more emphasized at lower clocks. Thus their comparison will be even lower :(
I'm optimistic that AMD can pull off a 40% IPC increase. Heck, they could get a 20% IPC increase JUST by going back to Thuban. I'd hope they could tack on 20% on to that in the 5 years since Thuban's release.
Also, having hope or believing when seen makes no difference anyway until actual money gets spent, and at that time all will be known ;)
in many benchmarks it whooped the i7 extreme editions ass.
Disappointment was its inconsistency. Perform fantastic in one set of tests, then perform appallingly in another set. Then perform averagely on the rest.
It's leaked slides for the investors. So it would be more seriously inclined to deliver as promised as by law it has to be as near to factual as possible so the investors can make a educated decision to back the project financially.
Its processor market so the end performance will vary slightly and factors out their control such as software code can influence performance. But they are not allowed by law to lie to investors.
I just can't bring myself to get to excited for an AMD cpu anymore, maybe after I see what launch claims vs real world performance looks like next gen.
Lets use a little bit of logic here because this happened with Intel too (and this isn't an insult, just a fact.) When Intel ditched their Netburst design and adopted the Core architecture as we now know it, clock speeds were relatively low compared to the P4 and PD. While I suspect AMD is more than capable of delivering on such a promise, the question is at what clock frequencies are we talking about? If IPC is increased by 40% but we're getting CPU's at 3.2Ghz, then aren't we really talking about a realistic 20% increase in performance? I don't expect revision #1 will be perfect, so I'm not expecting clocks like Excavator has. I was also getting a little tired of the construction equipment code names for CPU cores as it doesn't inspire confidence when talking about speed. :)
seriously though, i really hope this turns out to be as good as it looks for AMD because its image has taken too many hits and OEMs dont really use their products which is sad bc for the majority of users AMD is good enough (CPU wise).
I have 2 computers that I want to upgrade when Zen comes out. In fact, I will be the first in line for the 8 core model.
I'd definitely like to try Zen though. At this point, I'd just like to move away from the current FX processors.
Dual core processor, unless they are in a business class OEM machine, are completely useless nowadays. Intel Quad Cores are really on good for very specific, singular tasks such as gaming only. Multiuse machines need more than 4 cores in my opinion which is why I use an FX 8320 and FX 8350.