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AMD Declares Ryzen Will Be a Four-Year Architecture (extremetech.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech : Having spent over four years designing the architecture, the company plans to keep it around for at least that long. That's according to CTO Mark Papermaster, who was on-hand to discuss the chip. First things first -- AMD is promising a hard launch for Ryzen, without any paper launches, limited availability, or limited product introductions. When Zen debuts it'll debut in multiple (still unknown) configurations, not a single eight-core part. As PCWorld details, Papermaster also confirmed the four-year target and emphasized that it didn't mean AMD wouldn't iterate the core. "We're not going tick-tock," Papermaster said. "Zen is going to be tock, tock, tock." There are several ways to read this sentence. Tick-tock refers to Intel's previous practice of introducing new CPU architectures in one product cycle and new manufacturing nodes in the other. AMD has never strictly deployed an equivalent approach over multiple product cycles. I wouldn't necessarily conclude that Papermaster is saying AMD won't deploy Zen on new manufacturing nodes over time, but that AMD intends to implement an aggressive series of tweaks and improvements to the current core as time goes by. There's a significant lag between when a design tapes out and when it ships to consumers. This means AMD's CPU design team is almost certainly hard at work on Zen's successor already, even though Zen hasn't actually shipped yet. While I can't make any concrete predictions about how Zen will compete against specific products in Intel's lineup, the demos we've seen and the product information already available has convinced me that Ryzen will be at least a meaningful and significant improvement on AMD's overall power efficiency, performance, and performance-per-watt.
I fear that their top end chip is still getting stomped by the Core i5 in most benchmarks, so they are still making last minute tweaks to improve performance. They can only do so much at this point, though.
I'd like to be wrong about that, but until we start seeing reviews I'm going to be a skeptic.
You mean, make their newest product available to people so they can sabotage their launch by "benchmarking" it with synthetic software which doesn't really support it and is specifically tuned to run well on Intel hardware and compiled with a compiler which specifically sabotages AMD CPU's? Why would they want to do that?
Give us real 8 cores with 8 FPU's. none of this cheap ass corner cutting. Intel has lost their way and you have a chance to become a real contender once again.
8 cores 4 ghz, 8 FPU's and make it faster than hell. go to 5ghz if you want, but some of us do real work and need high speeds in the cores and multiple cores.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I fear that their top end chip is still getting stomped by the Core i5 in most benchmarks, so they are still making last minute tweaks to improve performance. They can only do so much at this point, though. I'd like to be wrong about that, but until we start seeing reviews I'm going to be a skeptic.
What AMD will do that Intel won't do is release a mainstream chip with no graphics. If you look at the Skylake quadcore die you'll see something like 40% of it is graphics, 40% CPU cores and 20% miscellaneous. You could put four more CPU cores in the same space. Obviously you won't have built in graphics but for gamers you'll have a dGPU anyway, so nothing much of value was lost. Intel has force bundled this so they can kill the low end graphics market, but as a dGPU gamer you're paying an "GPU tax" for something you don't use. Of course you could move to the X99 platform and "enthusiast" CPUs, but then you're paying an even bigger premium for that. I don't know if they'll match an i5 single threaded, but it's a long time since games started to have to work with dual and quad cores. If games scale well to eight cores I'm sure a Zen octo-core will beat an i5 quad-core by a considerable margin. Of course Intel could just "mainstream" their enthusiast platform to compete, but that would mean lowering prices a lot. Either way it's a pretty big win for the consumer.
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