CERN Engineer Details AMD Zen Processor Confirming 32 Core Implementation, SMT (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: AMD is long overdue for a major architecture update, though one is coming later this year. Featuring the codename "Zen," AMD's already provided a few details, such as that it will be built using a 14nm FinFET process. In time, AMD will reveal all there is to know about Zen, but we now have a few additional details to share thanks to a computer engineer at CERN. CERN engineer Liviu Valsan recently gave a presentation on technology and market trends for the data center. At around 2 minutes into the discussion, he brought up AMD's Zen architecture with a slide that contained some previously undisclosed details. One of the more interesting revelations was that upcoming x86 processors based on Zen will feature up to 32 physical cores. To achieve a 32-core design, Valsan says AMD will use two 16-core CPUs on a single die with a next-generation interconnect. It has also been previously reported that Zen will offer up to a 40 percent improvement in IPC compared to its current processors as well as symmetric multithreading or SMT akin to Intel HyperThreading. In a 32-core implementation this would result in 64 logical threads of processing.

Comments

Re:They don't need to be up there

[eriks]

This. The A10-7800 in my rig is as power-efficient (at idle) as a similarly spec'd intel i5 box would be, has superior on-die graphics (which admittedly, I barely use) and came in about $300 less for mITX mainboard, proc & memory. I could have paid $1000 or more extra for a high-end intel i7 workstation, which would have given me maybe 30% higher performance (at best), that for the most part I'd never notice. AMD wins as far as I'm concerned, and they should make some inroads in the server space with ZEN.

Re:They don't need to be up there

[MrL0G1C]

has superior on-die graphics

As a gamer who always buys graphics cards, I don't want my CPU to cost more and have die space wasted with GPU that I will never use. If Intel, AMD and Nvidia got their act together my GFX card could be turned off whilst I'm not playing games and that onboard GPU would have a use, but sadly they haven't and gigawatts of electricity is wasted. Even getting AMD chips to use power saving has been a total pain to get working in the past - and the amount of power saved could buy a new processor over a few years.

Re:They don't need to be up there

[0111 1110]

This has always been AMD's angle in the business. Well, sorta. Fifteen years ago or about, their angle was to be as good for cheaper in the middle range of CPUs. Intel still had the upper hand for top chips.

Were you living in a cave between 2000 and 2006? AMD was generally preferred by enthusiasts and gamers during Intel's infamous Pentium4/Itanium/Netburst/Rambus period for at least the first few years of the new millenium. It wasn't really until 2006 with Core (Conroe) replacing Pentium that Intel finally took back the lead they had in the 90s. They released the excellent Pentium M CPU in 2003 but that was a mobile chip. Only one or two highly specialized and expensive motherboards supported it. Intel finally realized that the whole Pentium 4 development branch was itself an inefficient long pipeline cache miss, but by the time they did AMD was already the market leader in the enthusiast bleeding edge market segment.

At best Intel could have claimed to be tied with AMD in certain benchmarks, but most gamers and enthusiasts were going for AMD CPUs. During this period AMD CPUs often sold for equal or higher prices as well. Although Rambus RDRAM was ridiculously expensive and raised the cost of the Intel platform a great deal.

Take a look at this Extremetech article . Maybe that will jog your memory a bit.

Also note Intel's naive optimism with respect to Moore's Law:

Justin Rattner, Intel Fellow and director of Microprocessor Research at Intel Labs, predicts 10GHz by middle of the decade (which I read as end of 2005 to early 2006)