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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Spunjji - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
If you think the way they marketed their cores was false advertising then I'm surprised to find you on a site like Anandtech.uzishan - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
the bulldozer also had 8 REAL CORES genius! They just grouped 2 cores on a module. The cores were completely 100% functional but they shared resources(like cache) clustered in that module. It is very good for multi-threading(Old FX's are still competitive on that matter) but quite crappy on single-threading. Problem is that most programs and games still run on single or a maximum of 4 threads hence the inefficiency of any cpu with more than 4 threads/cores. Next time do your homework! And the lawsuit failed by the way as there really are 8 x86-64 cores.xenol - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
" Problem is that most programs and games still run on single or a maximum of 4 threads hence the inefficiency of any cpu with more than 4 threads/cores. Next time do your homework!"I suggest you do yours because this isn't how OS scheduling and programs work.
blppt - Thursday, June 2, 2016 - link
8 full integer cores, but only half the number of FPUs, which had to be shared in each module. Heck, if I run Geekbench 3.2 right now on my 4790k (running 4.4 (turbo), but across all cores) and 9590 (oc'd slightly to 5ghz constant), the 9590's integer performance slightly beats the 4790k, which otherwise pretty much stomps the 9590 in any game.monsted - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
I'd much rather have four blazing fast cores than six or eight slower ones for my desktop. Servers are a different matter, but that's rarely what these chips are used for.ShieTar - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Your opinion is likely to change over the next 3-5 years. All of the new (2015/16 released) game engines manage to get good results from more than 4 cores. Of course it takes a while until those multi-year-development games catch up with engine technology, but it looks like a lot of games in the near future will be able to use 6-cores and 8-cores to hit those 120+X fps relevant for twitch gaming and VR scenarios.valinor89 - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
That is why doing that in 2011 was insane. Sometimes AMD looks too far ahead. They need winning designs for the code that is being run now.Still remember the first 64bit CPUs sold years before 64 bit software (at least in windows) was even thought off. In fact i has a 64 bit CPU that never saw 64bit code, as after 5 years it died before a mainstream 64 OS existed.
WhisperingEye - Saturday, June 4, 2016 - link
Yeah, it was too scary for me, so I bought the i7-950 instead. Clocked it to 4.2. Haven't upgraded my cpu yet. My PC has a Firestrike score of 10,700. Why should I? Too bad I didn't see the future in 2011.prisonerX - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Where are you going to find these "blazing fast cores?" Single thread performance is at a dead end. Increased parallelism is the future it's just that most software makers haven't quite received the memo yet, or they have but they think it's too hard.vladx - Thursday, June 2, 2016 - link
Because it is very hard to almost impossibl, no amount of work can change the way algorithms work. In fact majority of code is not parallelizable and will never be.