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

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. Good to hear. by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    AMD has been behind Intel for about a decade now ever since Intel released their "Core" processors. Because back in the early to mid 00's AMD CPU finally were considered serious chips in the desktop environment, outpacing intel. Then it just fell further behind.

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    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    1. Re:Good to hear. by avandesande · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Incorporating the memory controller in the CPU and adding the 64 bit instruction set were AMD innovation and had nothing to do with Intel making mistakes.

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      love is just extroverted narcissism
  2. Re:Kind of rigged test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah. Some rumors suggest that the Zen line will be disappointingly slow at launch (under 3 GHz). On the plus side, if we can get Broadwell-E performance out of a chip that costs $200, AMD will have a hit on its hands.

  3. Re: Kind of rigged test by Type44Q · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The real comparison will depend entirely on price-points.

  4. Re:In related news by gweihir · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You AMD-haters are really the most stupid morons around. Don't you realize that the only thing that AMD folding will do is that Intel improvements will vanish and Intel prices will skyrocket? Or maybe you people are into self-abuse?

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