A NEW HOPE
AMD’s new Zen CPU takes aim at the Intel empire
Not to put too fine a point it, but expectations are nothing if not high for AMD’s upcoming Zen CPU architecture. We’ve previously branded it as being everything from a new hope to AMD’s absolute last chance for survival. And as we look forward to 2017, the year Zen will finally arrive, it feels every bit as portentous as all that—Zen is a really big deal.
That’s chiefly because competition improves the breed, and ever since AMD launched its failed Bulldozer architecture back in 2011, Intel hasn’t really had any competition in the PC processor market. The consequence of that has been a state of general stagnation in terms of mainstream CPU performance on the desktop. Intel’s processors have been quad-core items, and have only improved very marginally in terms of conventional CPU performance over the past five years.
It’s into that context that we’re hoping AMD can drop a big old bomb with Zen. The good news is that there’s every reason to be optimistic. For starters, AMD has been fairly open about the errors of Bulldozer’s ways. So, say goodbye to Bulldozer’s radical modular architecture. Zen switches back to heavy-duty CPU cores, each with a full set of their own resources for crunching through as many instructions per clock cycle as possible. Zen also packs simultaneous multithreading, which means each core can process two threads in parallel. Sound familiar? It’s just like a modern Intel chip.
AMD’s aim with Zen is to increase the number of instructions the architecture can process per clock cycle— otherwise known as IPC—by 40 percent over existing AMD cores, without increasing power consumption per cycle. Sounds good, but will Zen deliver? AMD has demonstrated an eight-core Zen chip beating a sameclocked eight-core Intel chip by a small margin, albeit in a single benchmark. Also, the brain behind Zen happens to be Jim Keller. The same man who gave us AMD’s killer Hammer architecture back in 2003. Then again, more recent rumors have suggested an eight-core Zen will offer performance more in line with a six-core Intel processor.
Anyway, it’s thought that AMD will start with just one Zen CPU die for desktops, an eight-core design called Summit Ridge. If AMD really does inject an eight-core chip into roughly the same space as Intel currently operates with quad-core chips, that really will be a revolution. Watch this space.