AMD "Zen" CPU Core Block Diagram Surfaces

[Petey Plane]

Zen is a huge performance leap for AMD and also a very versatile core that will be applied across AMD's entire product line. Intel will be playing catch-u[p once again, especially in APUs.

And you know this... how? You need to tone down your fanboy. No one is hating on AMD, rather, most are just pointing out the current inferiority of AMD CPUs. Pretty much everyone here wants AMD to make a competitive CPU.

Sorry, but what do you expect when AMD's top CPU gets beaten in virtually every performance metric by an Intel CPU that costs $50 less, and offers things like PCI-Express 3.0, which AM3+ does not support?

Delusional fanboys who ignore basic facts make no sense to me.

 

[Ralfies]

Zen is a huge performance leap for AMD and also a very versatile core that will be applied across AMD's entire product line. Intel will be playing catch-u[p once again, especially in APUs.

Hating on AMD products is a waste of energy. The current AMD products provide good performance and excellent value. If that's not for you then buy from the convicted criminals at Intel. It's your dime. If not for AMD you'd be paying $1000 for a current Intel run of the mill CPU.

I wasn't aware AMD fanboys had developed the ability to see into the future. I hope you're right though.

 

[BiggieShady]

People shouldn't be asking what Zen performance will be like

Nothing is known about cache hierarchy, cache latency, fetch/decode width, memory controller latency and branch prediction. Only clue is this architecture should have more single thread performance, more floating point performance in general and all that without sacrificing multithreaded performance in the process.

Zen is a huge performance leap for AMD and also a very versatile core that will be applied across AMD's entire product line. Intel will be playing catch-u[p once again, especially in APUs.

Without answers to all unknowns listed above, you can't be sure in what you are claiming ... which does not come as a surprise.

 

[newtekie1]

I'm hopeful for this new architecture. I got excited when AMD brought on Jim Keller, who was the lead chip designer back in the Athlon 64 days, which was the last time AMD actually outperformed Intel.

I don't expect this new architecture to actually beat Intel, but I'm hoping it will bring them back to the point where they can at least compete up into the $300 price range. It would be nice to have an AMD CPU that can compete with the 4790K(or 5770K when it comes out).

 

[Frick]

I wasn't aware AMD fanboys had developed the ability to see into the future. I hope you're right though.

It's Jorge, look at his posting history.

 

[BiggieShady]

I got excited when AMD brought on Jim Keller, who was the lead chip designer back in the Athlon 64 days, which was the last time AMD actually outperformed Intel.

Let's not forget what he has done for Apple's ARM processors, they have the fastest ARM cores around.

 

[FrustratedGarrett]

Trouble for AMD is that their improvements don't exist inside a vacuum.

People shouldn't be asking what Zen performance will be like, they should be asking what will Intel's response to it perform like...

Intel has not been doing magic with their processors since Prescott you know. Intel's philosophy of building big cores and then the addition of hyper threading panned out well for them. There's no magic here...
AMD, on the other hand, had their phenom 1 CPUs delayed due to fabrication issues and then the TLB bug ruined that release completely. Their phenom 2 CPUs though were quite close to Intel's Cored 2 quads despite having less integers pipes per core (3 vs 4). Bulldozer didn't make it the way it designed to be. It's a complicated design and it led to big underperforming small cores and slow caches.

If Intel were so magical they would have had IGPs by now that beat what AMD has has now...
Be realistic about mate!

 

[Goodman]

I'm hopeful for this new architecture. I got excited when AMD brought on Jim Keller, who was the lead chip designer back in the Athlon 64 days, which was the last time AMD actually outperformed Intel.

I don't expect this new architecture to actually beat Intel, but I'm hoping it will bring them back to the point where they can at least compete up into the $300 price range. It would be nice to have an AMD CPU that can compete with the 4790K(or 5770K when it comes out).

I didn't know that about Jim Keller , after ready your post I was like what!! since when?
Although I don't follow much about computer tech anymore or games I should have known this...

Anyhow your post make me search about Jim Keller & found a great video interview (May 2014) with him and AMD team
I didn't give much hope for AMD but now after seeing this video maybe AMD still got a fighting chance for late 2015 to early 2016?

Mikey

 

[RejZoR]

Seeing how Core i7 920 still satisfies my needs, I'll most likely upgrade simply out of curiosity. Either Zen or Skylake. Hoping for the Zen really, because I really want to have an AMD again in my system...

 

[Aquinus]

...must be geographical.... I see way more A4, A6, -A10's than intels in the general Office Depot's , Wal-marts etc. Unfortunately There is also a ton of E1's and E2's out there too....

People don't have money, but businesses do, and businesses buy Intel and in bulk, not from Office Depot. The consumer market is peanuts in comparison and Intel has a chokehold on the X86 server and business markets. I see a lot of people in business with Intel-based laptops and almost never an AMD laptop unless the employee owns it themselves. Just an observation.

 

[alwayssts]

I don't expect this new architecture to actually beat Intel, but I'm hoping it will bring them back to the point where they can at least compete up into the $300 price range. It would be nice to have an AMD CPU that can compete with the 4790K(or 5770K when it comes out).

I have a fairly similar speculative outlook. While it may (or may not) be more in-line with competing with Haswell/Broadwell per clock, rather than Skylake etc, if they are willing to scale (in either core count or frequency), even if at a higher tdp, especially in untapped markets, I still think it's a win. More-so if simple parts are cheap and/or power-efficient while the enthusiast/server-end fight with Broadwell-E/EP.

What I care about at this point is Greenland: What is it (spec-wise)? How does it fit in? Is it one of many such chips (for multiple designs)? Will AMD MCM one with a low core-count cpu and many into a discrete product? Is it Fiji 14nm? Is it a derivative/divisible of Fiji (1024/2048)? How much power will that chip draw?

Could someone go ahead and leak that slide, please?

True fans pigionhole themselves blindly into certain products, potentially losing options.
Be a fan of hardware, not a fan of a brand.

Word. The thing is, he's not completely wrong imo, as there's a really difficult convictional/practical split there. It's hard to love, or even openly support companies like nvidia, even if they often have their ship a little bit more together. They're not unlike Apple (and arguably worse in some regards). In the case of Intel, I think it's part of the human condition to feel connected to the underdog. It's more-so exacerbated by how consumer-friendly AMD is in their public face versus the other companies whom seem simply driven completely by the almighty dollar (which granted arguably makes them more successful). I think the unspoken understanding among many (and I could be off-base) is AMD is allowed some performance/efficiency wiggle-room as their actions, some of which hold them back from financial success, give them 'political capital', as we want companies like that to succeed.

That only extends so far though, which I think is his point. I'm a huge AMD fan. A massive supporter; over the years I've used their options more often than not while closely following and admiring their technological developments. I think their methodologies (open-standards), pricing/market targets, and certain engineering breakthroughs are all uniquely great things, and deserve support. If they had something that fit my requirements, I would likely choose them without a second thought. The fact of the the matter is though...

...I write this from my Intel/nvidia-powered machine.

 

[ensabrenoir]

People don't have money, but businesses do, and businesses buy Intel and in bulk, not from Office Depot. The consumer market is peanuts in comparison and Intel has a chokehold on the X86 server and business markets. I see a lot of people in business with Intel-based laptops and almost never an AMD laptop unless the employee owns it themselves. Just an observation.

Big businesses tend to need more on the side of compute power and raw performance than graphics

 

[TheGuruStud]

Trouble for AMD is that their improvements don't exist inside a vacuum.

People shouldn't be asking what Zen performance will be like, they should be asking what will Intel's response to it perform like...

Intel has no response. They will keep cranking out die shrunk sandy bridges forever. That's what the roadmaps say LOL

 

[mastrdrver]

More leaks

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

So, why is any of this worth arguing over?

First, it's unconfirmed. As others stated, getting hyped over a slide without any basis in reality is just a waste of energy.

Second, why is any of this unreasonable? What is being announced is functionally a Phenom III. People said this when Bulldozer came out. I remember asking why AMD didn't immediately jump ship, die shrink the Phenom II, and consider Bulldozer as the equivalent of Pentium 4 (great on paper, poo in reality, gotta spread that Netburst hate). The better part of a decade later, and they announce exactly that. I'm not seeing why any of this is ground breaking.

Next, AMD and Nvidea share ownership of the patents that make most GPUs possible. They exist as such because video cards wars are stupid. Think back to the 90's, where each GPU would perform differently in games because they were few standards. AMD and Nvidea got together, and agreed to licensing of patents so their products had a market, rather than trying to split the existing market based upon hardware. It makes sense, if you release the next hot piece of hardware, and want everyone to be able to buy it and upgrade. This is why the Intel GPU generally blows. It isn't bad, but they have to find ways around existing patents. Sometime a simple job can become impossible, when the proper tools are denied to you.

The consumer market sucks. CPU manufacturers don't bend to it, because selling a tray of CPUs earns more money than selling a dozen individual ones. AMD, in the business setting, is a joke. They are more problematic in data centers, because of heat and a need for raw performance. Even if AMD released an excellent CPU that undercut Intel on the consumer side, their adoption into servers wouldn't happen for years. They cut their nose of with Opteron running like bulldozer, and coming back from that will take much more than one decent CPU release.

Why does AMD even care about the CPU side? They no longer have their own foundries. This puts them at a disadvantage when compared to Intel. Competing against Intel has also yielded poor results, because AMD doesn't have the budget to compete with Intel, Nvidea, and ARM all at once. The APU is decent, but ARM is a strong bit of competition. Nvidea provides more than enough competition in the GPU market. How can AMD do anything but compete against Intel with value? Right now Piledriver may be cheaper than Haswell, but it's performance isn't up to the standards consumers expect. 70% of the performance, for 80% of the price isn't a deal, and that's what AMD has got. Even if tomorrow they released a chip with 80% of the performance at 80% of the cost people wouldn't adopt it in the business world.



I'm hoping that Zen puts AMD into competition with Intel in the consumer market. I'm also hoping that the server implementation is good enough to draw business partners back to AMD. Despite these hopes, I think AMD should be focusing efforts on the APU and GPU. Those battles can be won, and the Zen architecture may well make a very mean little APU. Dividing their resources up for three battles just isn't a solid strategy.

 

[R-T-B]

True fannboys never jumped ship.

Fixed it for you.

As for the rest of you, no this probably won't bring AMD "back into the game." But if it's good it might bring them back into the ballpark. It certainly won't hurt them to have a moderately competitive CPU product for once.

 

[$ReaPeR$]

I have a fairly similar speculative outlook. While it may (or may not) be more in-line with competing with Haswell/Broadwell per clock, rather than Skylake etc, if they are willing to scale (in either core count or frequency), even if at a higher tdp, especially in untapped markets, I still think it's a win. More-so if simple parts are cheap and/or power-efficient while the enthusiast/server-end fight with Broadwell-E/EP.

thank you for a very rational argument mate i really dont get why people are so hatefull in the comment section.. also i would like to add that for the needs of most people AMD is just fine and the only reason they dont buy AMD is the hype which is extremely stupid.

 

[64K]

If I could have my way then AMD would be bought out by Samsung and revitalized with cash for R&D and gain competent management but that's just me wishing.

I would love to see AMD competing with Intel on their i5 and i7 CPUs so that Intel would have some incentive to give us more than a small increase in performance with each new generation but the reality is that AMD simply cannot compete with Intel. Intel has a market cap that is 87 times larger than AMD. Intel outspends AMD 10 to 1 in R&D. AMD is crippled by debt. They are almost nonexistent in the server market and,

"During the second quarter of 2014, Intel generated nearly 95% of PC processor revenue, shipping 84% of all desktop processors and 88% of all laptop processors."

http://www.investopedia.com/stock-a...oblems-facing-advanced-micro-devices-amd.aspx

Last year AMD lost 100s of millions of dollars and this year looks worse so far. In the last 2 weeks their stock has fallen 20%. Investors are getting nervous because if AMD does wind up in bankruptcy they will be the real losers. Creditors will come first. Investors will probably lose everything.

Net Profit Margins Q1 2015

Intel 15.59%
Nvidia 15.44%
AMD -17.48%

I think AMD should just stick with their GPU and APU and forget the rest.

 

[ManofGod]

And you know this... how? You need to tone down your fanboy. No one is hating on AMD, rather, most are just pointing out the current inferiority of AMD CPUs. Pretty much everyone here wants AMD to make a competitive CPU.

Sorry, but what do you expect when AMD's top CPU gets beaten in virtually every performance metric by an Intel CPU that costs $50 less, and offers things like PCI-Express 3.0, which AM3+ does not support?

Delusional fanboys who ignore basic facts make no sense to me.

*Sigh* Here we go again. Every performance metric? Yeah mean online benchmarks? Yeah, quick, I will run out and buy a dual core i3 to run on my Work and Home computers and replace my FX 8320 and FX 8350. Sure thing, I should see lightning speed differences in VM's and other work related stuff. In fact, the boot and program load times should be so different that it would burn up my SSD and boot before I even power it on.

Sorry but, the only good upgrade for me in the Intel area is a 5820K. The only way to double my performance would be with a 5960x and even then, I would mostly only see it in benchmarks. (I do not render video or do 4k gaming which is the only good reasons to move from what I already have.)