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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.

9 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. 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 GuB-42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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...

    2. 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
  3. 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?

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

    The real comparison will depend entirely on price-points.

  5. Re:Kind of rigged test by DuckDodgers · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  6. 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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