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AMD Outlines Plans For Zen-Based Processors, First Due In 2016
crookedvulture writes: AMD laid out its plans for processors based on its all-new Zen microarchitecture today, promising 40% higher performance-per-clock from from the x86 CPU core. Zen will use simultaneous multithreading to execute two threads per core, and it will be built using "3D" FinFETs. The first chips are due to hit high-end desktops and servers next year. In 2017, Zen will combine with integrated graphics in smaller APUs designed for desktops and notebooks. AMD also plans to produce a high-performance server APU with a "transformational memory architecture" likely similar to the on-package DRAM being developed for the company's discrete graphics processors. This chip could give AMD a credible challenger in the HPC and supercomputing markets—and it could also make its way into laptops and desktops.
Featuring GGL (Gateless Gate Logic).
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>40% higher performance-per-clock from from the x86 CPU core.
That could very slightly close the gap between AMD and Intel!
A latent existence
A lot of people don't really understand that the CPUs are already "fast enough" and that they can include other important issues in their buying decisions.
I mostly buy and recommend AMD because:
1) better price/performance ratio
2) code I write is designed to scale horizontally, which loops back to #1 even when it is a high load service
3) better power/performance ratio on desktops and servers
4) the motherboards are cheaper for the same components, and I hate over-paying even if the motherboard cost is too small a percent of the total system cost to matter very much
Intel does mostly win on laptops due to lack of availability of alternatives.
So I can get a 64 core machine with 512GB or memory for $8k instead of $80k.
At the low end good enough and dirt cheap pushes towards AMD. In the middle there are niches where braindead developers still don't have a fucking clue in 2015 how to write multi-threaded code so a fast i7 with hardly any cores is the best tool for the job, but that's a diminishing niche as developers start to learn what they should have in 1995.