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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.
In fact it was more like they took advantage of the P4 fiasco.
The NetBurst architecture was a failure, it could barely compete with Intel's own previous generation. They made a few bad design decisions. Perhaps they were blinded by the MHz race, perhaps they really thought long pipelines were the future, I don't know. However, they learned from their mistakes and their next generation (Core) was a success.
At the same time, AMD took a more sensible approach and the K7/Athlon was a worthy "next-gen" CPU. But maybe the lack or craziness also caused them to stand still when Intel advanced. Intel's commercial practices probably didn't help either...
The Broadwell-E part they benchmarked against is probably a (slightly underclocked) Core i7-6900k, and it's $1100.
I'm taking wild guesses with the numbers here, but "15% slower than a Broadwell-E at a 45% lower cost and a similar TDP" is a valid market strategy. I haven't spent more than $240 for a CPU in over ten years, if in spring 2017 there are Zen parts at the $250 price point that are 15% behind the 2017 spring equivalent of the Intel i7-6700k or i7-6800k I will buy it.
I wonder if it will have AMD's equivalent to Intel AMT, the Platform Security Processor. If so, it may be a no-go for some people.