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AMD Says Upcoming Zen CPU Will Outperform Intel Broadwell-E (hothardware.com)

Posted by msmash on from the promises dept.

Reader MojoKid writes: AMD has been talking about the claimed 40% IPC (Instructions Per Clock) improvement of its forthcoming Zen processor versus the company's existing Excavator core for ages. Zen's initial availability is slated for late this year, with lager-scale roll-out planned for early 2017. However, last night, at a private press event in San Francisco, AMD unveiled a lot more details on their Zen processor architecture. AMD claims to have achieved that 40 percent IPC uplift with a newly-designed, higher-performance branch prediction and a micro-op cache for more efficient issuing of operations. The instruction schedule windows have been increased by 75% and issue-width and execution resources have been increased by 50%. The end result of these changes is higher single-threaded performance, through better instruction level parallelism. Zen's pre-fetcher is also vastly improved. There is 8MB of shared L3 cache on board now, a unified L2 cache for both instruction and data, and separate, low-latency L1 instruction and data caches. The new archicture offers up to 5x the cache bandwidth to the cores versus previous-gen offerings. However, after all the specsmanship was out of the way, AMD actually showcased a benchmark run of an 8-core Zen Summit Ridge procesor versus Intel's Broadwell-E 8-core chip, both running at 3GHz and processing a Blender rending workload. In the demo, the 8-core Zen CPU actually outpaced Intel's chip by a hair. Blender may have been chosen for a reason but this early benchmark demo looks impressive for AMD and its forthcoming Zen architecture.

5 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting... by fyngyrz · · Score: 3, Funny

    Zen's initial availability is slated for late this year, with lager-scale roll-out planned for early 2017.

    You know, although a tank lager looks big from the outside, there are usually no more than a hundred or so tanks in one. So this doesn't seem like a very large rollout.

    On the other hand, if one of the tanks rolled over the editor(s), that would be a service to humanity.

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    1. Re:Interesting... by PopeRatzo · · Score: 3, Funny

      lager-scale roll-out planned for early 2017

      I prefer the porter-scale roll-out. Maybe in IPA-scale roll-out on a hot day. Because that's the way I roll out.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    2. Re:Interesting... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Because that's the way I roll out.

      I don't always roll out, but when I do I transform.

  2. Re:In related news by MiniMike · · Score: 5, Funny

    Bulldozers, Piledrivers, Steamrollers, and Excavators do use diesel engines. Maybe they hired the VW software engineers too late?

  3. Re:Good to hear. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    He's probably doing it on an old Pentium with the floating point bug.