Tuesday, November 3rd 2015

AMD "Zen" CPU Prototypes Tested, "Meet all Expectations"

AMD reportedly finished testing some of its first "Zen" micro-architecture CPU prototypes, and concluded that they "meet all expectations," with "no significant bottlenecks found" in its design. This should mean that AMD's "Zen" chips should be as competitive with Intel chips as it set them out to be. The company is planning to launch its first client CPUs based on the "Zen" micro-architecture in 2016, based on its swanky new AM4 socket, with DDR4 memory and integrated PCIe (a la APUs). Zen sees AMD revert to the large, monolithic core design, from its "Bulldozer" multi-core module design with a near doubling of number-crunching machinery per-core, compared to its preceding architecture.
Source: OC3D.net
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107 Comments on AMD "Zen" CPU Prototypes Tested, "Meet all Expectations"

#51
Musaab
nemSeems sales of INTEL gone to the $hit.. ;)
Sorry but in your dreams. They can't even secure a fab that can secure a decent supply of the chip.
Posted on Reply
#52
Jermelescu
I may be short-minded, but I strongly believe that Zen will be successful.
Why? Keller.
Posted on Reply
#53
HumanSmoke
nemSeems sales of INTEL gone to the $hit.. ;)
You should stick to shilling and trolling at WTFtech where most of the people can't read a financial statement

Chip maker Intel today beat analysts’ estimates for financial results in the third quarter of this year, coming up with $3.1 billion in net income, or 64 cents in earnings per share, and $14.5 billion in revenue.

Q3 2015....$14.5bn in revenue
Q2 2015....$13.2bn in revenue
Q1 2015....$12.8bn in revenue
Posted on Reply
#54
Ruru
S.T.A.R.S.
If they can even compete against 6-core SB-E chips it would be a good thing since no AMD CPU can compete against a 4 year old enthusiast chip from Intel.
Posted on Reply
#55
Ruru
S.T.A.R.S.
RejZoRAnd same happened with K7 and same happened with AXP's
AXP is also K7 chip.
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#56
Casecutter
lilhasselhofferThis is PR fluff
lilhasselhofferThe entire article is AMD trying to say that Zen will be amazing.
The article is fluff... a bunch of text crafted around a three word blip someone said... Interestingly AMD is not the author who posted this or any of it, we need to cease beating the drum over idle talk. Did AMD plant this, are others hoping to draw-out AMD to reveal something? I can’t say and nobody else can say, what’s truth. So it's just a rumor... about nothing.
Posted on Reply
#57
Parn
I sincerely hope Zen lives up to the expections. I'm still wondering when the geniuse who designed K7/K8/K10 for AMD would strike another home-run.

I used AMD CPUs exclusively between 1st gen Athlon and Phenom X4. When 1st gen bulldozer hit the market, I was sad to see its performance was nowhere near the hype that had been building up towards launch. As a result my AM3+ motherboard still carries on with only a Phenom X4 in my Linux server.

Compare 6700K/6600K to 4770K/4670K, there is a huge bump in launch price. I really hope AMD could bring some solid competitions for Intel or otherwise future mainstream i7s will probably cost more than an entire system from 2 years ago.

If Zen is released in 2016 and its top-end part can go head to head (or within 5% difference) against Kaby Lake, I will surely replace my aging AM3+ server with it.
Posted on Reply
#58
qubit
Overclocked quantum bit
I'll be gobsmacked if this brings performance parity with Intel. Still, even if it significantly closes the gap that will still be very useful for competition.
Posted on Reply
#59
Parn
Ferrum MasterI also don't remember it dominating really. OK Thunderbird was the first 1GHz stone but truly K8 was the first one to mop the floor with P4.

First of all no motherboards could hold a candle to i440BX and later i815, only when nforce2 came AMD got a good performing chipset.
True. Inferior chipsets was the major plague for AMD until nForce2. Then NV seemed to have lost focus after nForce4 and AMD were back to square one until they bought ATI and released 790FX.
Posted on Reply
#60
Aquinus
Resident Wat-man
I want to believe but... it's the AMD PR machine, man. It's a track record of showing us fancy looking diagrams and lackluster results.

Did Bulldozer "meet all expectations," before release? :confused:

See what AMD has done? It has made me a cynical bastard.
Posted on Reply
#62
truth teller
blah blah blah our new cpu design seems to work blah blah
why is this article worthy? come on @btarunr ...
Posted on Reply
#63
R-T-B
truth tellerwhy is this article worthy? come on @btarunr ...
You haven't been around much have you?

Pretty much anything that goes across the tech PR wire gets posted here, newsworthy or not.
Posted on Reply
#64
Blue-Knight
AMD "Zen" CPU Prototypes Tested, "Meet all Expectations"
Finally, an AMD CPU that can compete head to head with Intel?! :confused:
Posted on Reply
#65
cdawall
where the hell are my stars
9700 ProIf they can even compete against 6-core SB-E chips it would be a good thing since no AMD CPU can compete against a 4 year old enthusiast chip from Intel.
They compete fine when you use multithreading. Should AMD have designed something that utilized current coding styles? yes very much so, but they do perform excellent in a server environment when you take the word intel out of the equation. Go open source linux and run an application that uses all of the threads. Watch the "lackluster" AMD cpu's perform, in heavily multithreaded environment using encoders that are not brand specific the 8320 (and 8150 for that matter) perform better than the 6700K.
Posted on Reply
#66
Dippyskoodlez
cdawallbulldozer was a cool idea we just didn't have software that utilized it.
The problem is we have software that needs FPU.

"fury X" also met their "expectations".
Posted on Reply
#67
RealNeil
At this point, I can't bring myself to get excited about this until I read ~real~ reviews that are done by my favorite tech sites. (TPU and others)
After that, I'll wait to see if AMD prices them like they did their Fury GPUs. If they do, I'll stick with my FX-9590 and the three i7 systems that I have.

As I see it, ZEN can only achieve zen-like status if it's priced low, and performs righteously.
Posted on Reply
#68
HumanSmoke
cdawallThey compete fine when you use multithreading. Should AMD have designed something that utilized current coding styles? yes very much so, but they do perform excellent in a server environment when you take the word intel out of the equation.
AMD's x86 server market share pre-Bulldozer: 6.5%. AMD's x86 market share now: 1.3 - 1.7%
Not all of it down to the CPU. The platform as a whole determines sales revenue, and AMD's Opteron platforms are a virtual dinosaur in today's market. Blaming software coders really only goes so far. HPC applications tend to use a high proportion of hand-tuned code for the architecture, yet how many new/upgraded clusters use AMD Opteron? AMD talked up the Cray XK7 Titan like there was no ceiling to what Opteron could achieve, yet as soon as Cray knew what lack of improvement Vishera would bring, dropped AMD faster than you can say Xeon, with the legacy XK7 and XE7 being the only interest the company has with AMD, while the new XC's are exclusively Intel powered.
RealNeilAt this point, I can't bring myself to get excited about this until I read ~real~ reviews that are done by my favorite tech sites. (TPU and others)
Even some info from a respected site might not go amiss, but WCCFtech are about as far from that as it is possible to be. Clickbait bs is their usual m.o., this just looks like more of the same to feed their mentally defective comments section.
Posted on Reply
#69
RealNeil
AquinusI want to believe but... it's the AMD PR machine, man. It's a track record of showing us fancy looking diagrams and lackluster results.

Did Bulldozer "meet all expectations," before release? :confused:

See what AMD has done? It has made me a cynical bastard.
Didn't AMD fire most of its PR staff after Bulldozer underwhelmed us?
Posted on Reply
#70
Serpent of Darkness
truth tellerwhy is this article worthy? come on @btarunr ...
The article is meat to start setting up expectations and "light the beacons of Gondor" moment about AMD Zen. Until 3rd party benches are released, the only natural step is to be on the lookout for any news. The members of this forum and others, will continue their natural state of speculation, QQ-ing, arguments about the fails and wins of AMD Zen.

To answer your question, it gets the community members coming back to the website. Since the website is probably displaying ads for funding, the more members who recirculate back to see it, the better for TPU's benefit because they get a cut from it. Anything with focus words like "AMD ZEN" or "NVIDIA GTX Titan HBM 16GB PASCUAL" or "AMD R9-690x appears from the darkness" to name a few, will have community members coming back, and they will see the ads or pop-ups. Similar situation occurs on YouTube when you monetize videos. If consumers are watching some random person's videos, they will see the ads with the videos. The owner of the videos gets a cut of the money spent to put up the ads, and the cut goes up when more viewers watch the video because it equates to a greater chance that the viewer will purchase the product from newegg or an online store. So in a since, btarunr's actions could be justified to sustain the website on a financial level, if it was important. To go even further, Guru3D.com left their "QQ" post last week. It's a similar situation where pop-up blockers were stopping the ads from being displayed to community members and site visitors. Since less ads were being viewed, Guru3D makes less money in the process. Thus, this is the justification for the "QQ" post.
Posted on Reply
#71
Pumper
Best thing to do here is to ignore everything that AMD claims. They have been overstating the performance figures of their hardware for 5-6 years now.
Posted on Reply
#72
cadaveca
My name is Dave
When you feel so contrived to calla product "Zen"... sheesh. It's all cool, daddy-o.:pimp:
Posted on Reply
#73
geon2k2
Too bad the source is not very reliable.

A guy, which knows from a guy which used to work at AMD and who knows from another guy which still works there ... and which is posting for the first time on a forum.

And how are they going to convince people with pretty new i5/i7 Haswell or Skylake to move over ... its not clear to me. For few more years from now on, GPU replacement will bring better performance than just replacing the CPU. And new shiny GPUs on 16 or 14 nm are on the way.
Posted on Reply
#74
hellowalkman
I believe Zen will be within 20% of Kaby Lake's IPC and that should be great for a lot of people if priced correctly.

By the way, AMD isn't claiming or hyping anything right now so if Zen fails they shouldn't be blamed. They can only do so much in the financial jeopardy that they are.
Posted on Reply
#75
the54thvoid
Super Intoxicated Moderator
Serpent of DarknessThe article is meat to start setting up expectations and "light the beacons of Gondor" moment about AMD Zen. Until 3rd party benches are released, the only natural step is to be on the lookout for any news. The members of this forum and others, will continue their natural state of speculation, QQ-ing, arguments about the fails and wins of AMD Zen.

To answer your question, it gets the community members coming back to the website. Since the website is probably displaying ads for funding, the more members who recirculate back to see it, the better for TPU's benefit because they get a cut from it. Anything with focus words like "AMD ZEN" or "NVIDIA GTX Titan HBM 16GB PASCUAL" or "AMD R9-690x appears from the darkness" to name a few, will have community members coming back, and they will see the ads or pop-ups. Similar situation occurs on YouTube when you monetize videos. If consumers are watching some random person's videos, they will see the ads with the videos. The owner of the videos gets a cut of the money spent to put up the ads, and the cut goes up when more viewers watch the video because it equates to a greater chance that the viewer will purchase the product from newegg or an online store. So in a since, btarunr's actions could be justified to sustain the website on a financial level, if it was important. To go even further, Guru3D.com left their "QQ" post last week. It's a similar situation where pop-up blockers were stopping the ads from being displayed to community members and site visitors. Since less ads were being viewed, Guru3D makes less money in the process. Thus, this is the justification for the "QQ" post.
Saying Guru are 'QQ' about ad-blocking is unfair. Most tech sites have no financial backing so run all costs on ads revenue. Only other alternative is paid subscription or sponsorship (fixed banner - no pop ups) both of which are bad. It's mobile that's worse by far but also some sites use really invasive, page blocking ads. The ones used here and at Guru etc are tucked away neatly. Ad Blocking is useful for some but a selfish move. It's a case of 'I want free media' yet people forget that in real life , most things have a cost.

So is this new click bait? Who cares, it's rumour and we all love rumour.
Posted on Reply
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