Last night, AMD provided a glimpse of its next-generation “Zen” processor core, highlighting how the new grounds-up architecture achieves the most stunning performance leap increase in generational performance in AMD’s history.
The new “Zen” architecture is designed to scale across all of AMD’s CPU business, from enthusiast desktop platforms to enterprise-class servers and notebooks, to embedded and semi-custom products. The initial “Zen” CPU core is stated to deliver more than 40 percent improvement in instructions per clock cycle over the previous generation cores and will come to market first in an 8-core, 16-thread system-on-chip for desktops (=Summit Ridge). For the new architecture AMD focused on three key areas when designing this special architecture:
- Performance of the engine itself with completely new branch prediction, introduction of a micro-op cache and a much wider instruction window;
- Throughput, to keep that high-performance engine fed with data and instructions out of memory through pre-fetching and a completely new cache memory hierarchy with 8 MB of L3 cache; and finally,
- Efficiency having performance and throughput without increasing power, by leveraging a 14nm FinFET process and a wealth of power saving design techniques in the architecture.
Over at IDF AMD is showing ZEN performance demos where Summit Ridge (8c/16t) is competing with Broadwell-E.
Expected to launch first, the “Zen”-based “Summit Ridge” desktops will utilize the AMD AM4 socket, a new unified socket infrastructure that is compatible with 7th Generation AMD A-Series desktop processors – previously codenamed “Bristol Ridge” – for exceptional performance and connectivity scalability required by AMD partners and customers. The first desktop systems featuring 7th Generation AMD A-Series processors and new AM4 sockets are scheduled to ship in the second half of 2016 in OEM PC designs.
With dedicated PCIe lanes for cutting-edge USB, graphics, data and other I/O, the AMD AM4 platform will not steal lanes from other devices and components. This allows users to enjoy systems with improved responsiveness and benefit from future-ready technologies that the AM4 platform provides with a powerful, scalable and reliable computing solution.
AMD AM4 platform key technology features include:
- DDR4 Memory
- PCIe Gen 3
- USB 3.1 Gen2 10Gbps
- NVMe
- SATA Express
