Gadgetory

so I am in San Francisco this week and last night I had a chance to attend a press conference held by AMD where they discussed some further details about Zen their brand new CPU microarchitectures that is much anticipated they've been working on it for quite some time and according to the CEO Lisa Hsu and the CTO mark paper Master Zen is a brand new of course completely built from the ground up and they are focusing on a few different things re-establishing themselves in the gaming market which they've already done a pretty big push recently with Radeon Side immersive platforms such as VR as well as reestablishing themselves in the data center now md had some very specific goals was then they wanted to be able to design high-performance desktop CPUs as well as mobile CPUs for laptops notebooks they also included better branch prediction in the architecture micro-operation cache instruction level parallelism 75% more scheduling capacity and 50% more scheduling with and execution resources all this information of course is provided directly by AMD we haven't been able to do any independent testing ourselves so grain of salt but what they have shown is pretty impressive they've added an 8 megabyte l3 cache they've given five times the improvement in cache capacity and bandwidth they've introduced SMT simultaneous multi-threading which simply put is basically Intel hyper-threading but done by AMD this will allow the CPUs to take advantage of downtime and unused clock cycles by allowing the operating system to identify to actual threads for each individual core it's based on 14 nanometer FinFET design and they are touting 50% higher frequency using the same power at least at the ideal point on the frequency power curve efficiency they say was a goal from the ground up and according to what they're telling us it's pretty damn impressive 40% performance gain versus excavator which is their last iteration of their previous architecture using the same energy per cycle guys that is a really impressive performance game and efficiency is incredibly important whether you're talking about notebooks or data center use so that is a really nice spec the actual CPU that they're showing off is codenamed summit ridge this is an 8 core 16 thread CPU based on am 4 platform which is the new platform for these CPUs ddr4 PCI Express gen3 and next gen io which were not exactly sure what it is but probably Thunderbolts and nvme support for example they didn't just tell aspects though they actually showed us a side-by-side performance demonstration using blender to render a scene versus Broadwell II so this is what we can assume as the 6900 K which is also an 8 core 16 thread chip both CPUs were clocked at 3 gigahertz so they had the same amount of cores and the same frequency and basically they're showing us that with the same clocks and the same number of threads the summit ridge chip actually outperformed Broadwell lead just by a hair maybe a second or two margin but again really impressive if Xen is on par on an instructions per clock level with Broadwell II that is impressive now we're told that the actual frequency for summit ridge cpus is expected to be higher than 3 gigahertz but good to know it can at least do that hopefully preferably more and then the TDP was the final question that is still unknown we're told it's very competitive but they're not giving specifics yet now there's a new chipset for summit ridge we don't know too many details about it other than that next gen IO comments but they actually had machines up and running so even though these are really really early samples that are pretty much mocked up just to do demonstrations and testing green PCBs all that stuff it was cool to finally see an a.m. for motherboard in person they also introduced Naples which is their server platform they had a motherboard demonstrating that look kind of like an ATI motherboard for some reason but two processors on that so we should expect to see some nice performance hopefully on the server side as well and then they had some demos going on so they were showing Zen plus a VR using an RX 480 they had a gaming demo they were playing Dave's x-man kind of divided at 4k using Zen with a fury X workstation demo with a Radeon Pro duo that was just kind of there to see it they didn't really do anything with it and then of course that to processor server which just it's it's cool-looking I know it's a server system but I thought it was pretty cool looking anyway they're expecting to roll out these chips at least the summit ridge that they teased at the end of 2016 possibly a small launch at the end of 2016 but they're promising us them by q1 of 2017 at the latest we should expect Zen notebooks by the second quarter of 2017 and we should expect the Naples platform to start rolling out in the second quarter of 2017 there's still some questions rolling around TDP of course is a big one we need to know much power these CPUs are actually drawing and that still remains to be seen though and then I asked if they were planning to have any m4 mini ITX motherboards because that's something we've been missing from the mainstream platform for AMD for a while they said most likely I don't know probably they said we'll have them available in a wide variety of form factors which I took to mean probably but they don't want to absolutely confirm that yet anyway guys I hope you've enjoyed this video if you did hit the thumbs up button thanks for watching and we'll see you next time