AMD Briefly Shows Off Zen “Summit Ridge” Silicon
by Ryan Smith on May 31, 2016 11:15 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Zen
- Computex_2016
- AM4
After an already packed Computex 2016 event with Radeon Polaris and Bristol Ridge/Stoney Ridge news, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su had one final surprise to close out the company’s presentation: Zen, in the flesh.
Zen taped out earlier this year, and AMD is now working on bringing it up in their labs. To that end Dr. Su pulled out a very early engineering sample of what will be AMD’s Summit Ridge CPU, an 8 core Zen-based CPU. Summit Ridge will use AMD’s new AM4 socket – currently being rolled out for Bristol Ridge – making it a drop-in platform replacement.
Little in the way of new details on Summit Ridge and Zen were released, but Dr. Su confirmed that AMD is still targeting a 40% IPC increase. On the development front, the chip still has some work to undergo, but AMD is to the point where they are going to start sampling their top-tier, high profile customers with engineering samples here in a few weeks. Wider sampling to their larger OEM base will in turn take place in Q3 of this year. AMD has not mentioned a retail product date, but keep in mind there’s a fairly significant lag time between OEM sampling and retail products.
Finally, Dr. Su also reiterated that Zen will be the basis of a range of products for AMD. Along with the desktop CPU, AMD will be using Zen as the basis of their next, 8th generation APU. And further down the line it will be appearing in server products and embedded products as well.
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stardude82 - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
It's currently couched in there "module" and "core" languaged. Windows reports them as cores and threads respectively. I haven't heard anything, but they did get sued for this.ANobody - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
This is a new ground up architecture, I've been waiting for it the moment bulldozer came out and I finally admitted I had to buy a 2500k cpu. It uses threads, the wording is correct. It's completely different design from the bulldozer and it's revision designs.h4rm0ny - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
They got sued by an opportunistic lawyer who represented himself in the case and doesn't understand CPUs. I never heard of the case going anywhere. If FPU is required for something to be called a "core" then there's a Hell of a lot of older chips out there you'll have to stop defining as CPUs, and some modern chips as well.rhysiam - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
"so with 40% IPC increase where does this theoretically put them in regards to Skylake i7?"That's a good question. I did a bit of digging. Comparing an FX-8320 (3.5-4Ghz) to an i7 6700 (3.4-4Ghz) gives you these results in Anandtech Bench: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/698?vs=1554
It's not pretty reading! Admittedly there's only two single threaded tests, both from Cinebench, and I don't claim to know how representative those Cinebench tests are of general single-threaded performance. But you can see, clock for clock in those two tests, Skylake is within a whisker of double the single threaded performance of the AMD Vishera. Ouch.
I'm really hoping Zen does well, but I am worried that 40% IPC just isn't going to cut it, even if they can clock it higher and offer genuine 8 cores.
mdriftmeyer - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Why are you comparing it with Vishera? This will be 40% IPC increase over Excavator. God people are dense around here.Gigaplex - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
AMD never built a comparable Excavator chip. Excavator was only ever used in low power APUs. Piledriver/Vishera was as far as they got before they gave up.Spunjji - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Doesn't matter, it's an IPC comparison and Excavator's IPC is significantly higher than Vishera.Galatian - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Does AMD actually state to what Bulldozer Derivative they compare their "up to 40% IPC increase"?psychobriggsy - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Yes, Excavator.Some people suspect that over Bulldozer it's 60%+ higher IPC.
What really matters is what the clocks will be.
Meteor2 - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
I don't believe that's the case. I've never seen AMD qualify the 40% statement.