AMD’s Bold New Plan
ZEN ARCHITECTURE IS SET TO CHALLENGE INTEL DOMINANCE
Keeping track of AMD’s plans is never easy. But here’s the good news. The latest update provided by AMD for investors makes for seriously sexy reading for PC enthusiasts. It’s exactly what we wanted to see.
In short, it’s all about a brand-new CPU architecture called Zen. It looks like everything else either dies or is on hold until Zen is out of the door in 2016. That’s good because Zen is a new high-performance x86 core that AMD says addresses all the shortcomings of its existing Bulldozer-based CPU designs.
Out goes the Bulldozer’s modular makeup with shared floating point units for each pair of integer execution resources. In comes something that looks a lot like an Intel CPU. That means traditional cores with not only much better capacity for IPC, or instructions processed per clock, but also simultaneous multithreading that’s a dead ringer for Intel’s Hyper-Threading.
Oh, and the whole thing will be built on 14nm process tech and it’s due next year. And get this. AMD is claiming IPC improvements in the order of 40 percent. If AMD delivers all that, we’re going to be giddy, because it’ll mean Intel will finally have some serious competition. That will be excellent for everything from driving down prices to pushing up performance all-around.
Overall, AMD’s latest update was a shift back toward the stuff we care about the most, namely traditional high-performance x86 processors. The company hasn’t entirely ditched plans for its K12 ARM CPUs. But they’ve been deprioritized until Zen is on the market and won’t now appear until 2017.
A huge question over the execution of these plans remains, of course. The launch of the existing Bulldozer series of CPUs wasn’t the company’s highest point to date, as it arrived late and failed to live up to expectations. We’re therefore hopeful, but not making assumptions. Bring on
2016 and bring on Zen.